U.S. Attorney Deborah Yang of Los Angeles has been perhaps the country’s most vigorous prosecutor of identity theft crimes. She released a report to the L.A. Times yesterday (Saturday 7 October) detailing her investigations of the three newest sources of identity theft. They are:
1. Mortgage bank employees: quick and easy mortgage companies do less background screening of their employees than major banks will do, so identity theft operatives can often get jobs there without rigorous background checks. Once inside, these employees have access to all kinds of personal information from persons applying for loans. They steal the information and, for a price, give it over to the identity theft rings.
2. Mail carriers: the identity theft rings have co-opted some mail carriers into delivering mail with personal identifying information to the identity thieves instead of the addressees, obviously for a price. Ms. Yang said in the article that the investigation into this is continuing.
3. Restaurants: your friendly local waiter or waitress may be working for an identity theft ring. The waiter or waitress (again, for a price) swipes your credit card into a “scanner” which captures the electronic information from the card. The waiter or waitress then delivers the contents of the scanner to the identity theft ring, which then creates a new card with your name, the electronic information from your card and new passwords, etc. as supplied by the identity thieves. Viola! The identity thieves go shopping with your card, run up false charges and then destroy the card.
The moral of the story? Realistically, if waiters, mortgage employees and mail carriers are now being co-opted by the major identity theft rings, there is no absolute way to prevent identity theft short of living out of a cave. The solution is to know how to address the identity theft once it occurs, and then not worry about it. As a practical matter, someone who knows how to handle an identity theft usually loses no money and, these days, not too much time. There are always exceptions, but if you know how to handle these situations, you’re less likely to be badly victimized if it does happen to you.
There are many useful tips on handling identity theft elsewhere on this blog and also on socalcreditdamage.com.
I hope this has been helpful to you.