Posts Tagged ‘Identity Theft’

Identity theft topped 2009’s list of customer complaints released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It most frequently took the form of credit card fraud.

The report analyzed the complaints by type and location. Identity theft accounted for 278,078 complaints, or 21 percent of the total. The state with the most identity theft complaints was California, with 42,209. Florida, Arizona and Texas reported the highest number of such complaints per capita.

Third-party and creditor debt collection and Internet services also generated large numbers of complaints. The combined number of complaints related to these issues was still less than that for identity theft.

The complaints are received and stored by the Consumer Sentinel Network. Last year, there were more than 1.5 million complaints sent to the network, 54 percent of which were related to fraud. The median amount paid on these fraud complaints was $399, according to the report. Of the fraud-related complaints that reported initial contact, almost half pointed to e-mail.

Along with the list of top complaints, the FTC released a new animated video about filing a complaint. The video, which is available in Spanish, identifies various types of scams and directs consumers to ftc.gov/complaint to file a report.

Nothing like hitting them when they’re down.

Florida’s unemployment office, also known as the Agency for Workforce Innovation, experienced a computer security breach on an external test server in mid-October, inadvertently making public the names and Social Security numbers (SSNs) of about 250,000 residents who used the services of Florida’s One-Stop Career Centers between January 2002 and November 2007.

While the information was never posted to a public website, it was accessible by search engines during the two-and-a-half weeks it was public, the Florida agency reported.

Looks like some Florida job seekers now have more to worry about than the lack of a paycheck (as if that weren’t enough). That’s because fraudsters who use the stolen SSNs to open up new lines of credit can quickly damage their victims’ credit by going on a spending spree. Even aside from any possible monetary losses, victims could be forced to spend countless hours contacting creditors to repair their credit, time that could be better spent on their job search. And if job-seekers fail to check for damaged credit, it could come back to haunt them later, possibly jeopardizing their ability to get a job offer should prospective employers do a routine credit check and come across an ID thief’s handiwork.

Florida residents who used the One-Stop Career Centers during the stated period are being advised to check the Agency’s website to see if their name appears on the list of compromised identities, obtain a copy of their credit report to look for unauthorized transactions and carefully review all credit and debit statements.

In a world where millions of personal records are stored electronically, one small glitch can quickly become magnified a thousand times over. Whether it’s our state and federal government agencies, places where you shop or your own online Facebook account, confidential details, once they’re made known, can at least embarrass us or at worst cost us deeply in terms of stress, aggravation and time spent undoing the damage.

Is identity theft on your radar and if so, what do you do to safeguard your credit?

It isn’t just Disney that receives high scores for creativity in Orlando, Florida. Identity crooks also seem to be getting so creative that some are asking what could they really achieve if they put their creative minds to do good work instead of thievery and crime.

The story that received so much attention involved a Wal-Mart store in Orlando, where a strange box with an antenna was found, resulting in the store being evacuated and the police bomb squad being called in. The box didn’t contain a bomb at all, but surveillance cameras and further investigation showed that it contained a spy-cam that was seemingly focused on customers making credit card transactions inside the store. It’s suspected that the spy-cam captured the credit card numbers of unsuspecting Wal-Mart customers and beamed those credit card numbers via the wireless video device to thieves waiting in a van in the store parking lot. Though it’s not yet known if any of these customer credit card numbers have yet been used by the crooks or other accomplices, it certainly is expected that these thieves set up this elaborate scheme to perpetrate credit card fraud and identity theft. Police and Wal-Mart authorities are attempting to alert customers of the potential for further unauthorized activity.

There’s no doubt that some of these crooks could use their creativity and skills in a much more productive way. And even if they aren’t interested in helping others, they could help themselves by turning their technical ability into a high-paying technical career that might include helping organizations secure their sensitive data, much in the same way that perhaps one of the most famous identity crooks, Kevin Mitnick, does today.