Posts about Identity Theft by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Professor James Grimmelmann likes to shop at Kohl’s. So much so that he applied for credit at Kohl’s. And he got it. The problem is that James Grimmelmann didn’t really apply for anything. It was an identity thief.
Lazarus had it easy. Not so for Laura Todd, who has been trying to come back from the dead for nearly a decade. According to WSMV News in Nashville [link no longer available]:
Kudos to my friend Chris Hoofnagle (Samuelson Clinic at Berkeley Law School) who had his paper on SSRN written about by the New York Times:
A study by Javelin Strategy & Research finds that identity theft declined by 11.5% in 2006: According to the study, 8.4 million adult Americans, or one in 27, learned last year that criminals committed fraud with personal data such as credit card or Social Security numbers. That’s down from 8.9 million in 2005 and 10.1 million in […]
For quite some time, banks and financial institutions have been using people’s Social Security Numbers (SSNs) to verify their identities. Suppose you want to access your bank account to check your balance, change addresses, or close out the account. You call the bank, but how does the bank know it’s really you? For a while, […]
Today’s Washington Post contains an interesting article about identity theft. Some identity thieves enlist unwitting employees of financial institutions into supplying them with personal information:
From CNET: About 1.3 million customers of a Texas provider of student loans are at risk of ID fraud, after a contractor lost computer equipment with sensitive information on them. The equipment, which was not identified, contains the names and Social Security numbers of the borrowers, the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan company said in a statement […]
There are new details to report about the famous Hamilton County public records website. Several years ago, the clerk of courts of Hamilton County, Ohio placed a wide range of public records online. Many of the records had extensive personal information about individuals, including Social Security Numbers and home addresses. The Hamilton County website garnered […]
One of the reasons why identity thieves are the luckiest criminals alive is because credit card companies make their crime really easy. This person at Cockeyed.com tried an experiment. He tore up his credit card application into little pieces, meticulously taped it back up, and then filled it out as follows:
New statistics from the FTC on identity theft illustrate some interesting trends. From the AP: