Los Angeles, Calif., Sept. 27, 2023 — Citing organized crime statutes, attorneys with Wisner Baum have filed the first RICO class action alleging that H&R Block, Meta, and Google jointly schemed to install spyware on the H&R Block site, scraping customers’ private tax return information for profit.
The suit comes on the heels of a July 2023 congressional report which found “a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy” when tax preparation companies shared millions of customers’ personal and financial information with Meta and Google, which used that information to create targeted ads.
The congressional report describes how Meta and Google helped H&R Block and other tax prep firms place “pixels” on the websites where customers entered tax information, in order to share that information with Meta and Google. The report found firms like H&R Block were “shockingly careless with their treatment of taxpayer data,” and that Meta had used this data to
