Identity theft

Just out of interest how many rape victims do you know ?

And how many do you know that you dont know about because they dont especially want to tell you about it ?

How is that relevant? Identity theft is supposed to be incredibly common and happening all the time so we should be doing all we can to counter it.

Rape, while a horrible crime, is fairly rare so one wouldn't expect to know [m]any victims.

Pardon? :-)

Well I can imagine many being too embarrsed to admit it. I am not - I did have some material used but it was stolen from the home not the garbage bin.

I was wondering about "And how many do you know that you dont know about", rather an odd phrase! :-)

Several more than the number of identity theft victims I know.

The papers hwoever seen to consider anything from getting a suspicious charge on your credit card to someone obtaining a passport in your name 'identity theft'

Indeed. And my guess, although I have no evidence to back this up, is that

90+% of all the "identity theft" that we read about in the news is good old fashioned fraudulent credit card use, and nothing to do with gangs of organised criminals rifling through rubbish bins so that they have enough information to get a passport in someone else's name.

Adam

It is, The Register published a neat analysis of this some months ago.

Do you have a link to it by any chance?

Thanks Adam

The part that the credit card companies keep very quiet about is that the majority of identity theft involves a corrupt call centre worker rifling through a database rather than anyone rifling through a dustbin.

Peter King wrote

Or, more frequently, getting instant credit in the form of a store card and running up £800 or so on it. Doing it twice, as a matter of fact....

These cases are never reported to the police, because they don't do anything!

Tumbleweed wrote

I didn't tell the Register about my identity being fraudulently used, and neither did thousands of others, I would assume. ;-)

According to a BBC report earlier there were 50,000 cases last year.

Steve Firth writes

Some stores are so eager for business that you can pick a name and address out of the telephone book, according to the fraud department of the bank underwriting two cards which were taken out using my name.

They would not tell me what I/D the perp used to con the stores. :-(

As do the government. Funny though, how that only started when they needed the identity theft argument to support ID cards.

you didnt need to. You and they told your credit card companies, and banks, and they told the government, who then twisted the figures to make just about every financial crime under the sun come under the heading of 'id fraud', so they could use it as financial 'justification' for ID cards.

no, you'd have to search for ID cards, fraud and similar. Its quite a good breakdown, derived from soem academic reasearch, rubbishing the governments figures that they use to "prove" that ID cards will prevent everything from fraud to terrorism to bird flu (give it time)

here it is

Not exactly identity theft, but my credit card details have been used earlier this year. Fortunately, I noticed it immediately, and they didn't have my address anyway. Does anyone have a recommendation for a cheap credit record report company? I checked a few, but it seems you always have to register for a monthly subscription (or have I looked at the wrong place?). I guess I'd like to know how my credit rating has been affected by this...

Thanks

Philippe

Thanks! Fascinating article. It should be required reading for any government ministers working on ID cards. Of course, that assumes that government ministers can read...