Tuesday, 4 September 2012

Be Informed Stop Identity Theft

By Anna Grange


Due to the rise of identity theft incidents being reported yearly, many organizations are implementing their own identity theft programs to provide citizens education to fight this spiteful crime. Since becoming a victim of identity theft can be a life-changing experience, both emotionally and financially, learning to prevent the occurrence of this crime through identity theft programs can help you and your families live a normal and happy life without someone else meddling with your personal information.

Because a child's identity is pristine and often remains unchecked for more than a decade, it is uniquely desirable to identity thieves. Just as appealing to criminals is the fact that a Social Security number with a clean history can be attached to any name or date of birth.

Steve Toporoff, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, says that while there is a feeling among industry insiders that child id theft is a major problem, it is very difficult to quantify because, in most instances, people have no clue that they are victims until years after the fact. A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percent rate for adults in the same population.

The "Deter, Detect and Defend" Program educates people and links to other organizations in both private and public sectors including law enforcement agencies, consumer groups, federal agencies and other trade associations to give consumers options on where to ask for help. The FTC identity theft program releases an informational kit for all organizations fighting identity theft that include a how-to booklet with instructions on educating consumers to aid organizations facilitate outreach programs. It also includes a brochure that these organizations can easily reproduce to give out to people who attend seminars and education sessions. To capture the level of damage identity theft can cause a person's life, a 10-minute video of victims is also included in the program to explain to people how to fight this crime.

Entrust America's medical identity theft prevention and recovery services include: A 24/7 hotline to call if you suspect you have been a victim of medical identity theft. Entrust America's on-call identity theft specialists quickly determine whether a fraud has occurred and, if so, which of the over forty different kinds of identity theft have been committed.




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