Dale Penn

Part I:

What you can’t detect, anticipate, control or prevent could kill you.

There is a dark world far beyond the gates of mere identity theft. This region lies beyond the boundaries of credit card fraud, phishing and pharming scams or corporate data breaches.

The victims who inhabit this world are reportedly growing in number. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently reported that as many as 250,000 Americans may be engulfed in medical identity theft each year.

The current economic climate fans the flames of temptation for perpetrators who include health care workers, those with access to medical and insurance records and regular Janes and Joes who are personally struggling with the economic reality of “too much month left over at the end of the money.”

Its not just the career criminals who are taking advantage of the health data that falls into their hands, but desperate and otherwise harmless opportunists who can’t resist the temptation to latch on to someone else’s medical history.

Consumers drowning in debt, may find the lure of this type of theft too great to resist according to Chris Dorn, a fraud expert with Ingenix, a health care investigations firm in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Dorn says “Anytime you have 47 million Americans without adequate health care coverage, you will have people out there willing to steal it.”

The life threatening nature of this type of fraud and theft are apparent. Imagine that someone else’s medical problems were suddenly thrust into your medical records without your knowledge. This could change the way you are treated in a hospital or emergency room, change your blood type and allergy records or litter your personal medical files with maladies that could affect your ability to travel or to obtain certain types of insurance.

Next post, I’ll take a closer look at this growing problem and examine what the experts are commonly referring to as the age of “medical exploitation.”

Consumers may have finally scored big time!

Credit reporting agency TransUnion has agreed ( as part of a pending class action settlement) to provide free credit reports and credit monitoring to anyone who had a credit card, loan or credit account between January 1998 and May 28, 2008.

In case you’re counting, that amounts to over 160 million Americans who would qualify for free credit monitoring. Under the settlement, the free monitoring would be good for between 6 and 9 months.

After a 10 year legal battle in which TransUnion was accused of selling private consumer data, it seems that anyone with a loan during the last 10 years will get this neat gift by simply applying for it.

The data in question was sold to marketers like retail and financial institutions, who then analyzed it and sent out unsolicited offers (a.k.a. junk mail) to consumers like you and me.

In addition to the free credit report available now from the big 3 bureaus, consumers will also get free monitoring of their credit files. Monitoring can be a useful early warning signal that an identity fraud has occurred or may be pending.

Until now, it seemed that consumers had no defense against the sale of their personal and private credit profiles. During my public lectures, I have always shared the dangers of this sort of “dirty tricks” industry practice which I refer to as “Pirates Peddling People’s Personal Preferences.”

A TransUnion spokesman denied that any law was ever violated and claims that the practice in question was terminated in 2001. The company plans to make lemonade from lemons when it begins an ad campaign in mid June to announce its free monitoring plan to the public.

You can read a copy of the settlement online at: www.listclassaction.com Claims can be filed starting June 16th, 2008 on the website or by calling 866 416-3470.