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Privacy Policy

Account Disclosure

Identity Theft Complaints Soaring

Recent surveys suggest that consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about identity theft, and with good reasons. Law enforcement statistics indicate that the reported instances of identify theft are soaring.

A semi-annual report produced jointly by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and financial services trade associations identified 617 identify theft complaints filed between January and November 2000 compared with only 44 filed in all of 1997. The Federal Trade Commission reports an even more dramatic increase. The agency now responds to some 1,700 complaints and inquiries related to identity theft each week, making that the agency’s leading consumer complaint.

The Treasury report points to the loss or theft of a purse or wallet, mail theft, and fraudulent address changes as the most common sources of identity theft, but it also cites many instances in which “insider knowledge” is a factor, where individuals sharing a residence, relatives, and in some cases, financial institution employees, steal an individual’s identity. One common technique is “pretext calling,” in which a thief calls a financial institution and obtains information about an individual’s account by claiming falsely to be that individual. Federal law makes that practice illegal, but preventing it is difficult, financial industry officials say.

Federal regulators have suggested a range of steps that financial institutions should take to protect consumers from identify theft, among them:

• Instituting procedures to verify the accuracy of information on application forms.

• Verifying information before executing a requested address change, and confirming the change both at the old and new addresses.

• Require callers to supply a password before providing information about a consumer’s account.

Several states are attacking another common source of identity theft – stray credit card receipts. A new California law requires issuers to remove the credit card number and expiration date from most sales slips. Maryland is contemplating a similar law, and Washington state has already adopted it.

What this means to you:

“Who steals my purse steals trash,” Shakespeare said, but those thieves also can end up stealing your identity as well. The obvious message here is take precautions – lots of them. Hold on to credit card receipts (the garbage is the first place identity thieves will look for personal information); don’t disclose personal information on the phone (unless you initiated the call); be very careful about divulging your Social Security number; and protect your personal information on the Internet. At a minimum, check the privacy policy and the privacy rating of Web sites before providing personal information there.
 

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