Is Identity Fraud "The Crime of The Century?"

What is idtheft? Why I should be more concerned about it than being mugged at the mall!

The simple answer is, Id Theft, also called Identification Fraud, is the deliberate assumption of another person's identity, including their personal information,(i.e., name, date of birth, social security number, credit card numbers, credit score, bank account numbers, etc.), fraudulently and usually without their permission.

Identity thieves do this primarily to gain access to their victims' credit information or possibly to frame them for criminal activities the thieves may be involved in. Less commonly, stolen identities are used to foster illegal immigration, terrorism, espionage or simply to allow someone to assume a new identity permanently.

Id fraud usually occur because the perpetrator wants to obtain money or goods and services, on and offline, without incurring any personal financial debt or risk.

A identity scams may also be used as a means of blackmail, especially if medical privacy or political privacy has been compromised. Sadly, because most of our children and young teens have "virgin identities", i.e. they have not established any credit, child identity theft is fast becoming a significant problem.

SIDEBAR: Is it Id Theft or Fraud?

As ridiculous as it may seem, there are some objections to the use of the term "Identity Theft." The main reason some objectors give is:

A person's physical being and characteristics are not things that can be stolen: victims don't cease being who they are. Rather, the phrase is used to refer to the impersonationof these unique characteristics for the purpose of credit fraud, harassment, etc.

They would rather us use the term "identity fraud." We say to those individuals, So what? Six of these, half a dozen of those, what's the difference? Everyone agrees on one thing, it's a very serious crime that's here to stay.

We concede that, technically, the latter term is more accurate, however, because popular culture has dictated that society recognize the crime as "identity theft", we are just going with the flow. Let's face it, what we call it is hardly the battle we need to be fighting.

There are legal web sites that sell Social Security numbers, sometimes for as little as $20! They are found in records called "credit headers", and believe it or not, they are sold by credit reporting agencies to information brokers! These headers include name and name variations, current and former addresses, telephone numbers (including unlisted numbers), year and month of birth, and SSN. At this time, there are no restrictions on the sale of credit headers to information brokers.

Can consumers "opt-out" of the sale of their credit header data? Not likely! The information broker industry adopted a voluntary privacy policy in 1997, but it has been ineffective in restricting the sale of sensitive personal information to the
general public. More on this may be found at: http://www.irsg.org/.(See the Individual Reference Services Group guidelines).

Is there any wonder why even some Federal Government Agencies are starting to refer to Identity Theft as "The Crime Of The Century"?