Stolen names, stolen lives
Fake IDs helped the terrorists; but don't expect a quick fix for identity theft
Carded. The patchwork of IDs available complicates the job of authorities trying to verify what's real and what's fake. There are 16,000 different versions of birth certificates in the United States. And there aren't just 50 drivers' licenses--one for each state--but 243. "Nobody can possibly know every version of every document that we print," says David Myers, identification fraud coordinator for the state of Florida. "I have to peek at my book all the time." Counterfeit papers, meantime, have gotten more difficult to detect because criminals have turned tech-savvy. "One could easily produce a fictitious document that purports to be a birth certificate," says the Secret Service's Townsend.
Crooks don't have to resort to counterfeiting, since so many personal data are available for the taking, online and elsewhere. The Social Security number--the magic nine-digit number that unlocks doors and is the password of identity theft--has never been more public. Health insurers use it for patient IDs, and universities use it for student IDs. It is bought and sold online, and it peppers public records. There are other, more grandiose schemes. "The hot ticket is what I call company infiltration," says Wayne Ivey, head of the identity theft task force at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Data have been pinched from payroll and personnel records, insurance company files, and retailer databases. Beginning in 1997, for example, a woman who worked at times for Ericsson, the electronics company, and Perrier swiped the personal data of coworkers and passed them to an accomplice. He siphoned about $700,000 from eight of the victims' E*Trade stock accounts and took cash advances of more than $800,000 on 60 credit cards.
While the problem gets worse--the Federal Trade Commission gets 4,000 calls a week to its identity theft hotline, more than double the volume of a year ago--solutions seem scarce. Victims and consumer advocates say creditors should be doing more to confirm the identity of those seeking loans, and credit bureaus should flag suspicious credit report entries. The banks insist they are doing what they can, citing consumer education and the systems credit card companies use to spot unusual purchases. "Clearly, the access of information that folks have everywhere makes it much more of a challenge to verify ID than ever before," says John Byrne, senior counsel, American Bankers Association.
No excuse, says Nicole Robinson of Oxon Hill, Md., who says someone opened two accounts in her name even after fraud alerts were posted on her credit reports. Likewise, Maureen Mitchell of Madison, Ohio, was outraged to discover last week that someone made four withdrawals totaling $34,000 from two of her savings accounts--two years after she'd been victimized by identity theft. After the original incident, Mitchell and her husband had placed security protocols on the accounts, which were supposed to prevent anyone from gaining access to them without a password and photo ID. "This has spun out of control," says Mitchell.
The major credit bureaus have been developing products to help lenders detect identity theft at an earlier stage. Consumers, too--but they have to pay. "We all have a vested interest in combating this problem," says John Ford, chief privacy officer at Equifax. Yet they too must strive to stay a step ahead of the bad guys. "If they [criminals] attempt new ways to compromise records and victims, we change and improve our abilities to detect that," says Diane Terry, head of TransUnion's fraud victim assistance department.
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