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.

With the holiday season upon us and the election season behind us, the average consumer may have their attention diverted away from personal privacy issues.

President-elect Barack Obama and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin were concentrating on the election, while high tech thieves smelled an opportunity to violate the candidates’ privacy with reckless abandon. These fraudsters were phone company insiders and random email hackers, not mobsters from an Eastern European crime family.

Here is an excerpt from a story posted on fiercewireless.com:

“Verizon Wireless has fired the employees who accessed President-elect Barack Obama’s personal cell phone account without authorization.

A report on CNN.com quoted an unnamed Verizon source, who would not disclose how many people were fired but said, “we now consider this matter closed.” Apparently the employees were involved in customer service and were not authorized to look at an account unless a customer requested it.

The source also said that records of no other well-known customers had been breached. The phone that was accessed was a flip phone that had been inactive for months, and was not a Blackberry or other smartphone from which email could have been sent or data services could have been accessed.”

In Palin’s case, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee has been indicted for breaking into one of Palin’s accounts and posting the information on a public website.

Here’s the point. We are all vulnerable to attack even if we are careful to do everything right in the privacy arena. Recovering from the emotional roller-coaster and sense of violation after being victimized can be both traumatic and lengthy. In extreme cases, you could even be facing a run-in with the law.

Prepare to remain steadfast this holiday season. If you are a member of AAA, you can unwrap an early Christmas present from them just by visiting their website and reading about their “free”, yes FREE credit monitoring and alerts for members only.

As major banks, insurance companies and investment firms fall victim to the current tsunami of financial storms, your privacy may suffer. When firms change hands, downsize their payrolls and transfer massive amounts of data, proprietary information is left exposed and privacy erodes.

At the end of September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took the single biggest dive in history, dipping 777 points. In the wake of the impending reorganization of American business, your credit card balances, your mortgage, your savings accounts and your credit history will probably be reshuffled and reinserted into the database of the account’s new overseer.

After days of marathon negotiations, the bailout measure initially went down to defeat in the Congress by a vote of 228 to 205. After the Senate and the House gave final approval for a modified version of the $700 billion rescue plan, President Bush signed it into law on October 3rd, 2008.

Although the free markets globally are facing their toughest challenge ever, those markets do work. The problem is that they are controlled by human beings who are subject to behavior that is sometimes irrational, emotional and irresponsible.

Because of the irresponsible and sometimes deliberate misdeeds of the guardians of the financial gate, it is still your responsibility to to guard your personal information the best way you know how.

If you do not have a personal identity theft risk prevention, detection and mitigation plan in place, what are you waiting for? Visit the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse for great tips on how to protect yourself.

Ironic twist makes this incident noteworthy!

Even high profile identity theft advocates are vulnerable to the threat of data loss, data compromise and data crime.

Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas) was among 3000 patients whose records were reported missing by the National Institutes of Health. An NIH laptop containing the medical records for the patients was reported stolen from the trunk of a vehicle according to a report this month by The Associated Press.

Here’s the irony. Barton is a founder of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, whose mission among other things is to educate members of Congress and their staffs on matters of individual privacy.

It is noteworthy that Rep. Barton only found out about his own breach in press reports. Barton has asked the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department to investigate why the information wasn’t encrypted and why the NIH delayed disclosure of the breach.

As difficult as it may seem to protect your financial identity, your medical records are much harder to secure. This is primarily because patients have no control over the handling and care of their own personal medical records.

The federal regulation designed to prevent these unsettling scams is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA) Privacy Rule. Unfortunately, it can be extremely difficult for patients to correct inaccuracies in their medical records, because insurance companies are not compelled to correct records which they did not create.

According to a report on msnbc.com, one medical identity theft victim had the contents of her wallet removed and despite the fact that she quickly cancelled all her credit cards, had almost $14,000 in prescription meds and treatments charged up in her name. Over the next four months, restoring her identity became a part-time job. She fought off bill collectors, struggled to get her own medical prescriptions paid for and nearly got arrested herself on suspicion of being a co-conspirator in the scam.

The numbers can be deceiving. According to the Federal Trade Commission, only 3 percent of U.S. identity-crime victims have their information used by others to obtain medical services or false claim reimbursements. This still means that nearly 250,000 Americans may be victims each year! The rising cost of health-care will only make these crimes more prevalent going forward.

The lurking dangers of not being able to access your own health benefits or having your medical records polluted with potentially life threatening mis-information makes this topic a sure recipe for more than just heartburn.

Postal Customers Receive Timely Alert

John E. Potter, CEO of the United States Post Office has weighed in on the severity and urgency of the raging identity theft battle.

Personally, I was very pleased to receive this piece of seemingly “junk” mail last week and I’m hopeful that most postal customers took the time to read it. The letter acknowledges both the scope and seriousness of this crime.

Readers were reminded of the  lasting effects that ID theft can exact upon one’s credit worthiness,  employment eligibility and even access to medical care.

In April 2007, President George Bush’s Identity Theft Task Force published a 108 page report detailing the government’s strategy to make the fed’s efforts “more effective and efficient in the areas of identity theft awareness, prevention, detection and prosecution.”

Coordinating the efforts of multiple government agencies to analyze crime reports, craft a strategic safeguards plan, utilize available resources, educate the public, investigate complaints and vigorously prosecute perpetrators is essential. Its also a mouth full.

Hats off to the Postmaster General for slipping this timely little letter and it’s accompanying brochure from the Federal Trade Commission, into my mailbox and yours.

 Well done!