Identity Theft Articles
When you walk in a doctor’s office, one of the first things you get to do is sign a form explaining your right to privacy. Yet, in a case on Capitol Hill, a judge ordered medical records to be opened and made public in the case of a woman who used the information of a dead person to receive treatment.
Was the Judge Right to Expose Medical Records?
The records revealed not only the woman’s crime of identity theft, but exposed her as an illegal immigrant, causing her to be targeted for deportation. In a country where big brother has their hands ...
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...on credit belonging to parents of sick child.
Marcus and Heather Oginsky’s son had surgery at The Children's Hospital in Denver. Like good citizens, they paid their bill, not knowing the person taking their payment and thanking them had more personal reasons to be grateful.
The Oginsky’s credit card number paid for her vacation in Vegas. Aurora-based Revenue Enterprises , a third party billing provider, terminated her after they found out she had abused her position as a specialist working on the hospital’s account. Revenue Enterprises says the woman in question had passed their background check. Incredibly, she’ll pass her next one, ...
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Some people move frequently, whether for work or other reasons. They may constantly be forced to update all information. This can put them at risk from ID thieves who take advantage of the lag in time while mail and bills catch up.
Favorite Tricks of ID Theives
A favorite trick of ID thieves is going through people’s trash. They hope to strike it lucky and find an unshredded bank statement or a deposit slip or unheeded credit card application. All too often we don’t get out mail reassigned on a later date - and that means we won’t be getting those late ...
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They were living high on the hog - BMWs, motorcycles, trips and fancy hotels and Dallas strip clubs every night. What they didn’t know was that the net carefully being laid by the Secret Service for two years was closing in.
Homeless People Used as Pawns
When Naval Petty Officer and former US Naval payroll clerk Cora Dixon decided that the men and women she worked with were easy pickings for ID theft, she didn’t take into account the government’s fury at someone who would take advantage of the nation’s military.
The Texas woman and five others, including her boyfriend Seneca Wills, rounded ...
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Becoming the victim of identity theft is bad enough. Being arrested on behalf of the criminal is worse. When a thief robs an innocent individual of his or her account information and goes on crime sprees, the victim may be caught in the crossfire.
Perhaps most insultingly of all, the victim may not even know he’s been had until the police come knocking at his door. And to top it all off, his account may have been depleted and his credit ruined.
Surprise!--You’re a Criminal
The St. Paul (MN) Press reported on Oct. 29, 2008 that Beth Ellidge gave police her sister Nicole ...
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Virginia and many other states used to use Social Security Numbers on drivers licenses. Due to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 which went into effect on December 17, 2005, all new licenses and registrations issued since that date have randomly assigned numbers.
Unfortunately, not all of the licenses from before have expired, and a serious security breach that occurred during the elections in Charlottesville, Virginia could have serious ramifications. Two laptops with personal information such as the names, addresses, birth years and DMV numbers of every registered voter in the city were stolen after the polls closed ...
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“Just Google it” is the mantra of today’s electronic generation. The information highway is quickly traversed, and the amount of information grows daily. Google has declared that their intent is to be the main source of data for generations to come, but with the compiling of all this data also arrives the new potential for Identity theft and fraud.
"To Whom it May Concern..."
This was made glaringly apparent in a Letter to Judge Rosenthal from PublicResource.org, which stated that over 1,718 instances of personal identifying information had been discovered in records which had been released for inclusion in Google’s public domain. ...
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Is the German insistence on online security the reason German consumers have much less ID fraud than English speaking buyers? Paypal recently commissioned a survey which revealed that 1 in 10 shoppers in the US, UK and Canada are identity theft victims, compared to 1 in 20 in Germany, Spain and France.
E-commerce in Germany is equivalent to that in the UK, which puts paid to Paypal’s suggestion that ID theft "tends to occur in countries where a higher percentage of e-commerce is concentrated". Why then do the Germans have such a low incidence of ID theft?
Paranoia Reigns
There is no denying ...
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At a glance, the numbers may seem reassuring: experts say overall ID fraud was down for the past several years, decreasing by more than 12% between 2004 and 2007 (see this study).
But crime experts are warning that with the recent headline-making economic events may come an increase in criminal activity…and that you could become a victim.
Consumers have gotten wiser to ID fraud in the wake of online, phone and ATM theft news in recent years. Unfortunately, so have criminals--and their tools of the unsavory trade are more sophisticated than ever. Know what to look out for in order ...
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There has been controversy throughout this entire campaign regarding identity fraud being used to illegally funnel campaign contributions to various candidates. In previous elections, identity fraud was alleged to have been used to cast invalid ballots. In a country where every person is supposed to have a voice, the idea that someone could steal that right away and use it wrongly is not to be tolerated.
The Democratic Proposal - Obama:
Barack Obama voiced concerns in the Senate over the loss of 26.5 million veterans’ personal identifying information by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006. He claimed : “The system is so poorly ...
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