Nearly 13M Hit With Identity Theft This Year

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According to the latest reports, thirteen million people were victims of identity theft already this year. Wow. It is pretty sad how widespread identity theft is these days.

So far in 2010, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports there have been 371 identity breaches that exposed 12,871,065 records in the United States alone. ITRC does not count stolen encrypted records. But the real total could be a lot higher. The ITRC’s breach database only includes previously published records from what the organization consider to be credible sources. Many data privacy experts believe data breach reporting needs to be improved as sometimes details of breaches are sketchy at best.
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That would be shocking, if it were remotely true.

Identity theft is an act of fraud. This article is about exposed records.
 
Nemesis999 said:
That would be shocking, if it were remotely true.

Identity theft is an act of fraud. This article is about exposed records.
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wtf else other than identity theft are they going to do with your stolen ssn? Play scrabble with it?
 
Kulith said:
wtf else other than identity theft are they going to do with your stolen ssn? Play scrabble with it?
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Yes there is potential, but that doesn't mean it will happen. Two different things. If my shady neighbor has my identity information that means he has the potential to do it not that he has actually done it. The article is misleading regardless.
 
miss-leading or not, it sheds a light on just how UNSAFE your data is when all these companies claim otherwise.

I hope this opens some people's eyes to the truth and give them more to fight against giving personal info to every other company / government agency who demands it for no real reason.
 
miss-leading or not, it sheds a light on just how UNSAFE your data is when all these companies claim otherwise.

I hope this opens some people's eyes to the truth and give them more to fight against giving personal info to every other company / government agency who demands it for no real reason
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I concur. When I banked with Wachovia my account information "might have been hacked." I had to changed. The banked proceeded to get hacked again and again. I left, obviously.

The bank which holds my student loan was hacked. I was giving access to free credit monitoring that only last a year. When I should get lifetime and a free freeze to my credit.

I still have an excellent credit and I want to maintain this, but it seems almost out of my hands and this seriously fucking pisses me off.
 
If your identity has been compromised, whether by a hacked acct, "misplaced" records, laptops, drives, whoops I leaked records on the net etc and your identity or identifying records are in possession of a third party that you did not give permission to, then you are a victim of ID theft. That third party does not have to do anything with those records but be in possession of them without your permission. The fraud occurs once they do something for gain with that information.

Lets say you catch your idiot neighbor digging through your trash, if you call the Police on him and they find him in possession of documents, bank statements whatever, that have your personal identifying information on them, he can be brought up on charges of Identity theft. He is in possession of illegally obtained personal information.

I have worked in the banking Fraud/Risk Management Investigations field for the last 5 years and deal with this crap everyday. I have had to sit through 8 hour symposiums and week long ACFE conferences, and I can assure you that 13M compromised identities is a conservative number.
 
Just makes you wonder when we're all using cloud computing, and the server gets hacked. Then all your stuff is known.
 
Shikami said:
I concur. When I banked with Wachovia my account information "might have been hacked." I had to changed. The banked proceeded to get hacked again and again. I left, obviously.

The bank which holds my student loan was hacked. I was giving access to free credit monitoring that only last a year. When I should get lifetime and a free freeze to my credit.

I still have an excellent credit and I want to maintain this, but it seems almost out of my hands and this seriously fucking pisses me off.
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wow that's scary
 
I just had to cancel my paypal debit card as someone got the number and started making charges down in georgia somehow. I have no clue how.
 
red&black said:
wow that's scary
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Banks don't care.

Last year I had fraudulent charges on a card that had expired over a year earlier. I called the bank and told them about the fraudulent charges, but since the card had expired, they did nothing, since the charges shouldn't stick. Next day, charges did stick, along with about a dozen new charges.

The bank finally closed it. But, they still made me fight that the charges were fraudulent, including the ones that were done after I called them and notified them about it, and even though the card information used had expired more than a year earlier.

I used to be an employee of this bank, and they still treated me like a criminal for several months while they investigated how an expired card was used for dozens of transactions, and why they failed to close said card completely once I notified them of current and continuing fraudulent charges.

I finally moved all of my accounts out of the bank just last week. Since they could tell by my account numbers I am a current/former employee, they were curious why every account was now closed. I explained.

They then showed me their screen to verify to me that indeed their system shows that all accounts are status: closed. I told them that also was the case over a year ago on an account that I was treated like a criminal over and forced to prove wasn't me...

Had to have been an inside job...
 
Credit cards need to revamp their security models, but from what I've seen, they really don't seem to care.
 
Years ago....maybe 10 years or thereabouts. My parents had a CC they had gotten maybe 6-9 months prior to them noticing weird charges on it. Asking if I had used it without them knowing or know what it could have been. Was some kind of adult content service, but you wouldn't know that until you called the bank or number on the charge list because it was one of those generic looking entries on the statement. Turns out they had been paying this since they got the card, but it was so generic it looked like some of the other charges on there and was a low amount (under 25).

They had been assigned a CC number that someone else had prior to them and the charge was coming from a service the previous guy had signed up for, or that's how the bank explained it. And after a lot of arguing they got most of the months refunded.

But I always wondered if someone at the bank was slipping the new CC numbers out to some side business and having them charge small amounts to the cards with generic looking info. It's not as if they'd ever admit to finding someone who was doing that if it had been happening.

While it's not technically ID theft, it demonstrates a failure in the CC and bank industry that the same number was assigned to two different people too close together to stop charges from carrying over or leaking info somehow.
 
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