Reuters Money
Identity theft among family members affects millions
Two million to three million elderly parents had their identities stolen between 2006 and 2010 by a younger family member for fraudulent reasons including opening lines of credit, according to a new study.
The report by ID Analytics is different from typical surveys on the subject, which only capture what people say. This time, company CTO Stephen Coggeshall says, the figures are based on analyses of 1 billion applications for credit cards and cell phones that showed just how many times younger family members apparently fraudulently used their elder parents’ credit.
“We are literally looking at the entire set of credit-active people in the United States. Even surveys wouldn’t uncover this, because a lot of victims don’t know they’re victims,” he says. “The realities of familial identity theft are far worse than anything you see in a soap opera. It is the ultimate in family betrayal.”
Identity theft expert Linda Foley, who runs the consultancy ID Theft Info Source says the sad truth is family members steal each others’ identities because they can. “If you want to steal a Social Security number, it’s far easier to steal the information of someone close to you because you have easy access.” And she adds that this is a grossly under-reported crime because it’s particularly difficult for the victims to turn in their own children. ”The egregiousness of this crime is the parents don’t feel the need to protect themselves from their own children,” she says.
Laws in most states adds extra penalties when the crime victim is a senior, and on Thursday Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) introduced legislation to protect seniors from fraud by court-appointed guardians and conservators. But legislation hasn’t yet translated into change. Last March when Mickey Rooney testified before Congress about elder abuse, he said he wasn’t a rare case of family members bilking money from older relatives, stealing their identities and committing other types of financial fraud. But what is rare about his case is that Rooney, 91, went public with it, and announced in September that he is suing his stepson and other relatives, alleging years of financial and emotional abuse that cost him millions.
The typical scenario of identity theft of older family members, Foley says, is when an adult child starts helping an elderly parent with the finances. When you’re older, she says, “It’s unlikely you’re going to be checking your credit report all the time. So they remain blind to the crime.”
When an adult child has been put in charge, Foley notes, that’s often who is informed when there’s a suspicion of theft.”If the adult child is the one managing the parents’ finances they’ll simply be told that someone is stealing their parent’s identity and they already knew that,” she says.
ID theft protection services are not one-size-fits-all
With an unprecedented string of major data breaches this spring from Sony to Citi and many in between, identity theft protection services have a greater import than ever before. Data-theft victims have a far higher likelihood of being a victim of identity theft than do those whose data was not taken.
But what can protection services do for you if you have had your data stolen? And what can they do for you if you are not at risk from any specific data breach? The multitude of offerings claiming to help can be a confusing mish-mosh of good and bad that takes some work to sort through. And since the services typically cost $10-$20 a month, you should know what your investment buys you before you sign up.
“It’s very difficult for the consumer to really figure out what it is and what services they’re getting,” says Phil Blank, managing director of security risk and fraud for Javelin Strategy & Research, which released a new report on the offerings in the identity theft protection industry. The report says the industry will take in $3.5 billion this year from consumers. About 25 million people have credit monitoring subscriptions, according to Javelin.
Javelin found that more of the offerings were comprehensive — providing monitoring, protection and resolution assistance — and are now even being wrapped together with computer anti-virus tools. The report recommended the industry move to more standardized descriptions and focus less on hype and more on honesty when marketing their products.
The good news from Javelin’s study is that the field is rapidly evolving and adapting to the changing threats. “It’s important for the consumers to know that it’s not one-size-fits-all,” says Blank. “Security is a multi-layered approach.” Because the industry is still young there are new offerings and different approaches being tried all the time. Many services come with free trials that last two weeks to two months, and Blank suggests taking one for a test spin before subscribing.
One trend forecast in the report was the offering of minimal free identity theft services as a means of marketing. AllClearID offers a no-cost subscription (they don’t even ask for a credit card), that provides some basic protection but has none of the bells and whistles of the pricier offerings.
Even looking at just one company can take a little effort. Identity Guard, for example, has four different plans consumers can choose from. Some other popular brands are LifeLock, TrustedID and Privacy Guard. All three of the credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion also sell their own identity theft protection services.
Such a great info! its help me a lot..thanks for sharing! keep it up ya.
Child identity theft: Why you should worry
Michelle Dennedy’s daughter Reilly is nine and already has had her identity stolen twice. Earlier this year Dennedy, who lives in California, learned that the most recent use of Reilly’s identity was to get utilities set up in Arizona.
She is part of a growing trend — stealing the identities of children. On July 12, the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a forum on child identity theft, pulling together a broad group of parents, lawyers, advocates and experts to discuss how to handle this disturbing crime.
“The criminals are focused on where is the softest the target and we’re handing them our kids,” said Dennedy, who was the chief privacy officer for Sun Microsystems and vice president for privacy at Oracle Corp. and started a website on the issue. “We have a whole generation of kids being compromised.”
Children are, indeed, an easy target. They become victims without even knowing it.
“Child ID theft is a particularly troubling crime because it is often undetected for years,” said David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
A child could become victimized at birth and not even learn of the situation until they apply for a student loan or have a background check done for an internship when they’re a teenager. A recent study found children’s identities are stolen at more than 50 times the rate of adults. There are several reasons why.
Until now, there was really no reason to check on your child’s credit report. After all, children don’t have credit histories. Social Security numbers have been issued in a somewhat predictable sequence, so identity thieves have taken to plucking newly minted numbers or those that would have been given out a couple of years ago and started using them to help people to acquire an identity with a clean slate — one not tainted by prior financial woes and one that could be used to gain employment in a country they did not legally enter.
Any Social Security Number MUST INCLUDE the DATE OF BIRTH.
In a fact ALL national numbers in Scandinavia includes the year & date of birth plus some special ‘control’ digits from 1947, so NO ONE can steal child’s ID or invent itself.
I didn’t know that numbers in USA was so funny undigested, that very stupid, really.
A ‘new idea’ about foto in the comments was very funny too (just think about how to use the ID number ‘with foto’ in the Internet – via webcam?), thanks for a good time, lol ))
Study identifies 45 million ID cheaters in the U.S.
About one in six Americans have intentionally altered their identities on applications — an estimated 45 million people — according to a new study using 1.4 billion records from 300 million distinct people.
“All consumers suffer because we all have to pay high costs and fees because of these fraudsters,” says Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer for ID Analytics, a company hired to help prevent fraud.
(Watch Coggeshall on video discussing the study.)
The records were compiled from applications to banks, financial institutions and telecommunications companies by ID Analytics. An estimated one-third to one-half of those — potentially more than 20 million Americans — are committing outright fraud, Coggeshall says.
“This is the first time anyone has looked at the perpetrators of identity fraud,” he said in an interview. “This is the first time that we’ve really tried to figure out who are the perpetrators, who are the criminals, how they behave and where they live.”
Yes, where they live. Michigan and Texas had the largest clusters of those trying to cheat on applications, according to the study. Those trying to avoid having financial problems haunt them and those who entered the country illegally are two of the categories likely to be altering their identities, Coggeshall says.
“Deliberate identity manipulation is far more prevalent than we imagined,” he says. “There is a continuum here from what I call benign manipulation to clearly criminal.”
Tweet this, not that: Social networking and your safety
Do you ever broadcast on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare (or others) where you’re eating lunch, who you’re with and or even when you’re on vacation? Do you care who’s seeing it? If you don’t, you probably should.
Would you get undressed in front of a window?
The meteoric growth of social networking has exposed millions of people’s personal activities to a far larger audience than most might be aware.
“It’s really just the erosion of privacy in general,” says Kurt Roemer, chief security strategist at Citrix Systems. “You’re giving away information you may not want to intentionally give away.”
The networks are becoming intertwined and your ability to have any meaningful control over that information is essentially lost. For instance, when you check in with Foursquare and it goes out on Twitter, that information becomes searchable. Same thing with people boasting of a Groupon deal or trying to solicit friends to join.
“That incestuous behavior between apps is only getting worse,” Roemer says.
He says it’s time the growing universe of social networkers become aware of what can happen to information that was once considered personal but is now being widely distributed.
IRS sees staggering jump in identity theft cases
Identity theft fraud caught by the IRS has skyrocketed since 2008, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released this week.
n 2010, the GAO said the IRS found 245,000 cases of identity fraud — cases in which Social Security numbers of others were used to either falsely try to collect a refund or to get work and avoid taxes. That is up from fewer than 52,000 cases in 2008.
A particularly scary part of the crime is that the victims have no way to protect themselves.
“The incidence of tax-related identity fraud is indeed staggering,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “The number of reported cases significantly undercounts the actual numbers because there tends to be a significant delay in detecting most cases of tax-related identity fraud.”
He said the government is somewhat hamstrung from doing more to protect the victims.
“Unfortunately, various laws constrain the IRS from taking more aggressive action to curtail this abuse,” Stephens said. “For consumers, tax-related identity theft can be extremely difficult to resolve, despite the fact that IRS has set up a special unit to assist taxpayers with this problem. Other than trying to protect their Social Security numbers from unnecessary disclosure, there is little that consumers can do to protect themselves from this type of identity theft. ”
According to the GAO, privacy laws sharply limit information that is shared with victims and even with criminal investigators.
Guess who is the worst culprit for dumpster diving in putting WHOLE SSN on paper……. the IRS.
Identity fraud levels drop to four-year low
Thanks to signs of a burgeoning economic recovery, identity theft declined dramatically in 2010, but unlucky victims were forced to pay more out-of-pocket when defrauded, according to a survey by Javelin Strategy & Research released Tuesday.
The number of identity fraud victims decreased by 28 percent last year, bringing the total number of victims down to 2007 levels. Total annual fraud also decreased from $56 billion to $37 billion — the smallest dollar amount in the past eight years the study has been conducted.
The reason? Researchers found an almost-perfect inverse relation between the state of the economy and identity fraud. “The fraud incidence rate (has) almost a perfect inverse correlation to retail sales,” says James Van Dyke, president and founder of Javelin. “As criminals have less money to spend on stuff, they are more likely to turn into identity criminals.”
The decline is also attributed to fewer reported data breaches — just seven percent of U.S. consumers received notice their personal information was exposed to a data breach last year. Researchers note increasingly stringent creditworthiness guidelines from financial institutions also helped the decline in identity fraud, along with, an increase in online and mobile monitoring of financial accounts and an increase in the use of protection services.
But despite the drop in overall fraud, the cost to resolve identity fraud issues rose dramatically last year. Among the 5,004 people interviewed, the mean consumer out-of-pocket cost jumped 63 percent in 2010, rising from $387 in 2009 to $631 in 2010.
Why the dramatic uptick in price? The survey notes changes in the type of fraud being perpetuated — like new account fraud, which is harder to detect and is the most damaging to consumers — as one culprit. New account fraud is also popular with “friendly fraudsters,” who target people they are personally acquainted with such as roommates or relatives.
Want to know how to avoid becoming the next victim? Here are some tips recommended by Javelin:
Cybercrime: 3 threats to watch for this holiday season
Holiday shopping: It’s down to the 11th hour and rather than jostling for a parking spot or fighting for a fitting room, more consumers are choosing to shop online or on their mobile devices.
Sure, shopping online can save you some coin on shipping costs, and using a smartphone certainly makes price comparisons infinitely easier. But consumers are trading convenience for safety, according to a new study sponsored by Norton and conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research.
“It’s the amount of activity that makes people more vulnerable,” says personal finance expert Jean Chatzky. “People just aren’t being as careful as they should be in a number of different ways.”
Nearly 12 million people were victims of identity theft during a recent two-year period, according to a study from the Department of Justice. Approximately 6.2 million victims experienced the unauthorized use or attempted use of an existing credit card, representing the most common form of identity theft.
But just because you’re not a fan of plastic doesn’t mean you’re much safer – an estimated 4.4 million people reported misuse or attempted misuse of their personal banking account. The financial loss? A whopping $17 billion.
So where are consumers falling short on safety?
1. No password protection
Also: Don’t be a total idiot! Do not use passwords in the top ten. Do not use your role in life: “sales”, “mom”, do not use your mates name. “Harry, Ann, etc”. do not use digits from a phone, or the year, or “123″! Do not use a children’s name. Or city name. Or character from a movie; “spock” and fantasy character names are ultra common for some reason. no pet names, no mother’s name either.
Having said that, the Iranian government protected there Uranium centrifuges with a password of “password”, and the username was “administrator”, leading to some heap of the machines getting hijacked on there LAN. This is for a heap of machines that make fissile uranium; (as in: Instant urban development opportunity measured in the kT)!
So you’re probably better then they are at this already.
Beat that one for a negative example. (Stuxnet virus hijack success).
Its all a big laugh until it takes out your city. Password? “password”, nice, huh.
