[Locke]

Toronto man is suing the CRA.

Stephen Real is one of thousands of Canadians affected by a massive security breach in 2020. Three years later, he can’t pay his taxes, fraudsters are attempting to buy cars in his name and he fields more than 20 spam calls a day.

In late July 2020, Canada’s tax collectors got hacked—an unknown attacker managed to log in to thousands of online accounts using usernames and passwords stolen elsewhere on the web. They hit the jackpot: social insurance numbers, phone numbers, addresses, banking information—everything needed to assume someone else’s identity, commit fraud in their name and get quick access to CERB cash. Now, some of the victims are suing the federal government in a class action lawsuit, alleging that a glitch in the Canada Revenue Agency’s system let the hackers bypass users’ security questions

my direct deposit information had been changed. I hadn’t done that. Something weird was going on.

I called the CRA right away, but of course no one was working. So I logged in to my CRA account to try to figure out what was happening. Right off the bat, I found that the deposit information for one of my three accounts had been changed from my bank, CIBC, to BMO, a bank I’ve never used.

A week after the hack, I found myself holding a CERB cheque I’d never applied for. Once again, I called the CRA, and suddenly they were questioning me: “How did you get that cheque?” I felt as if they were accusing me of being the fraudster.

After that, three different CRA employees called me, all saying different things. One said I had to send the cheque back to the CRA’s headquarters in Quebec, so I did that via registered mail. I know from my tracking that it arrived and was signed for, but even now, three years later, the CRA is still asking me where it ended up.

For six months, the CRA stopped corresponding with me via email entirely. Eventually, they began sending me pro forma notes telling me to keep changing my password and monitoring my credit history. It’s incredible—their system failed, and it’s like they’re blaming me for having bad security.

One June 1 of this year, I got a phone call from a woman working for the CRA out of Vancouver. She was on her cellphone, at home. She said she had to see photo ID to verify my identity, but it was her first week on the job and she didn’t have access to the CRA’s internal system yet. All she could find was my passport. I asked if we could do a Zoom call so she could see my face. She refused, because that went against policy. She asked if I could fax her photos of my other ID. I refused, because that was ridiculous. Who has a fax machine?

https://torontolife.com/city/my-onli...suing-the-cra/

And these people want more money and to be able to work from home.

One of the single most dysfunctional Government Agencies there are. It needs to be torched to the ground, the Earth salted and start from scratch.