In a just released U. S. Department of Justice report, we learned that 8.6 million American households were victim to identity theft during 2010. Compare that with the 6.4 million victims during 2005, and an obvious epidemic starts to emerge. While most of us know what the term “identity theft” implies, the DOJ provides a clarification, “the unauthorized use or attempted misuse of an existing credit card or other existing account, the misuse of personal information to open a new account or for another fraudulent purpose, or a combination of these types of misuse.”
According to the DOJ, “The increase in identity theft victimization from 2005 to 2010 was largely attributable to an increase in the misuse or attempted misuse of existing credit card accounts. During this period, the percentage of households that experienced the misuse of an existing credit card account increased by about 50%, from 2.5% to 3.8%.” While crimes related to credit or bank accounts are the most common, they are by no means the only manifestation of identity theft. Identity crimes can take a dizzying array of forms, some of which may not be obvious, but are just as dangerous. One potentially lethal form of identity theft is medical identity theft. According to the World Privacy Forum, “Medical identity theft occurs when someone uses a person’s name and sometimes other parts of their identity – such as insurance information — without the person’s knowledge or consent to obtain medical services or goods, or uses the person’s identity information to make false claims for medical services or goods. Medical identity theft frequently results in erroneous entries being put into existing medical records, and can involve the creation of fictitious medical records in the victim’s name.” Unlike traditional financial identity theft, medical identity theft can be nearly impossible to correct. Errors in medical records can make it difficult to get insurance, complicate hospital admissions and implicate the victim in prescription fraud. Beyond those horrors, just imagine an imposter altering your medical records —- and then you receive treatment based on the fraudulent changes. Of course financial and medical identity theft are just the tip of the criminal impersonation iceberg. Falsifying driver’s licenses, immigration papers and social security documents are all big business. Researchers also warn about the growing trend of stealing children’s identities. They make especially good targets because they provide thieves with a clean slate upon which to build fraudulent personas. A particularly insidious form of identity theft well known to police is criminal identity theft. In this scenario, individuals faced with arrest or prosecution will give police another person’s information (name, birth date, address, social security number, etc.). Sometimes months later (after the imposter has long since absconded), the victim gets a knock on the door and has to prove to the police that they’re not the person named in the arrest warrant.
Often thieves will commit an array of crimes under their assumed identities. What can result is a combination of all the aforementioned maladies. One day you’re an exemplar of financial, health and legal rectitude. The next you’re besieged by debt collectors, insurance companies and the courts. Once begun, these troubles spread like a cancer across the databases in which we all exist. As malignancies often are, these can be just a difficult to excise. Experts say the best remedy is prevention and regular monitoring. Something as simple as a household document shredder can prevent trash pickers from gleaning your sensitive information. Collateral to that, we should all check our credit reports at least once per year. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, never ever give your bank account number, credit card information, social security number… any personally identifiable information to a telephone solicitor or over an unsecured website. As the man says, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. In the difficult times, we need not give criminals any help.