Dale Penn

Recently, the Identity Theft Resource Center looked forward to the coming year to predict events that will be the inevitable outcomes of the current economic crisis and the looming identity theft battles.

Real Estate: Homeowners who are behind on payments or seeking refinancing sources can easily fall prey to unscrupulous thieves who are more than willing to “take your information and see what we can do”. Bogus land grants and home equity scams will be commonplace. The recommendation is that homeowners speak directly with well known and established banking and mortgage companies in order to avoid the potential pitfalls of unknown solution providers.

Credit Cards: Many consumers may unknowingly turn to thieves in order to get access to credit cards, debit cards and debt consolidation loans. It is easy to imagine handing over private information to seemingly legitimate companies. Like the mortgage industry, the credit card world has been turned on it’s head in the current economic climate. Look before you “leap” into a deal that may be too good to be true.

Check Fraud: Due to the lack of easy credit, many thieves will turn to check fraud as a way to accomplish their crimes. Needless to say, safeguard your checkbook, deposit slips and banking statements as a first line of defense. Many financial advisers are steering clients away from using paper checks at all. If you must write paper checks, be sure to use an anti-check-washing gel pen and keep a close eye out for any irregularities on your statement.

Organized Crime and Cyber-Thieves- Rings of professional thieves from all over the world have helped make identity theft the fastest growing crime in the United States. Security experts agree that these attacks will become more brazen as time goes by. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been reviewing “worst case scenarios” for possible attacks against U.S. government, industrial and financial institutions.

Consumer Scams: Common and rampant scams with nicknames such as skimming, phishing, vishing, pharming and whaling will continue in 2009. This is largely due to the weak condition of the U.S. economy, the vulnerability of average consumer and law enforcement’s scarcity of resources to deal with the sheer volume of complaints.

Breaches: Corporate, educational and government security breaches continue to grow every year. According to the ITRC, there were 641 breaches in 2008, surpassing the total of 446 in 2007. Due to the portability of data, the easy theft of laptops, the cunning deception of “inside scam artists” and the desperation of global perpetrators, this number will continue to increase. At the very least, have your own laptop or PDA/smart-phone set up with encryption and password protection software.

Remaining diligent, alert and informed about the latest scams and threats is your best defense against being victimized in 2009. Stay tuned.

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.

The Oracle of Omaha shares our pain!

It is not surprising that many well known personalities are targeted not only because of their vast wealth, but because dumb criminals actually believe that the wealthy enjoy so much excess that they wouldn’t notice a few missing coins.

The spotlight shines brightly enough to cast a shadow over the financial affairs of many in the public eye. That spotlight however, hasn’t necessarily blinded them.

Oprah, American Idol finalist Ruben Studdard and even Herman Munster have all made the identity theft headlines in the past couple of years. Enter Warren Buffett.

A story in the March 2008 issue of Fortune Magazine cites the latest instance of a high profile identity theft victim. For those who don’t know, Buffett recently passed Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, with a net worth around 62 billion dollars.

According to the account, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO recently checked his credit history and discovered that his FICO score was slightly lower than the U.S. median. The less than stellar FICO score was attributed to a supposed “impostor” who may have compromised Buffett’s credit record.

Apparently, Mr. Buffett’s credit report cites 23 missed payments on a loan held by an HBSC branch in Nevada. The total loan amount was  a whopping $294.00. Buffett claims the account was never his. Nice try Warren.

Fortune reporter Telis Demos indicated that a recent study found that 25% of credit reports contain serious errors.

Although most of us will never share the financial spotlight with money making titans like Oprah and Buffett, we do share the same vulnerability.

Fortunately for Mr. Buffett, he didn’t ignore his credit history, he actually looked at it.

The rest of us would do well to follow that sage example.

Be afraid…..be very afraid.

We live in a world where our personal habits, personal preferences, personal information,  and private lives are sometimes taken for granted. Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer now realizes the folly of this careless, foolish and whimsical approach.

Last week, msnbc.com reported about the rash of failed savings and loans who are dumping mountains of personal information into trash bins as their businesses shut their shingles, fold their tents and abandon their clients.

The article chronicles the failure of First Magnus Corp. who was one of the largest mortgage lenders in the nation. The company was hailed as a “powerhouse” of savvy technological innovation. As unimaginable as it seems, “tens of thousands” of  documents including credit card and social security numbers were “dumped” in a nearby trash bin.

It now appears that every personal tidbit we make available in the process of securing credit for mortgages and secured or unsecured personal or commercial loans is up for grabs and beyond our ability to provide or even expect protection. Is that line of credit really worth the open exposure of all your personal data?

This new reality hit home for me today as an eagle-eyed industry associate correctly pointed out that a commercial lender who served each of our company’s mutual business clients had suddenly collapsed, leaving their customers and pending applicants’ data completely unaccounted for.

Mountains of juicy private data files are turning up in dumpsters and garbage cans all over the country. This criminal carelessness leaves us all exposed and hopelessly vulnerable beyond our control.

What’s a consumer to do? Protect yourself at all costs. Private identity theft insurance, regular credit monitoring and reactive credit restoration services are all good ways of keeping your guard up. To avoid pro-active identity self-defense is foolish.

The reality is that the information that passes through our hands and into the care of nameless, faceless, careless corporate grunts cannot be safeguarded with any degree of reliability.

Despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act was amended by Congress in 2003 to mandate better consumer privacy protection, commerce and industry must each do their part.

Because of the implosion of the sub-prime lending industry, many phone lines are down, many office cubicles are empty and many trash bins are full. In the new financial frontier its “every man and woman for themselves”.

Why not begin your proactive identity theft prevention/resolution plan today?