Terrorist and ID Fraud

Because of the proliferation of identity theft some companies are offering services using names like: Search Stolen ID, Check Stolen ID, Check Stolen Identity, or Green Flag identity Fraud?

Less publicized than consumer fraud is identification based concealment crimes.

As with consumer financial crimes, criminals acquire personal identifiers and then clone them to hide from authorities. Unlike credit financial crimes, these are not immediately obvious. They can continue for quite awhile without being discovered.

Concealed identity fraud includes illegal immigration, terrorism and espionage. There are also cases of identity cloning to obtain medical treatment.

The danger in medical identity fraud is that a hospital could mistake the ID crook's medical condition as yours. Imagine going in for an appendectomy and your leg is amputated because your medical ID has been stolen by a crook with cancer in her leg!

Concealed ID fraud works like credit fraud

An identity thief will call your credit card company and ask that the mailing address on your credit card be changed. They run up charges on your account ... and then have the bill sent to another address.

Other thieves open new credit card or bank accounts using your name, date of birth, and Social Security Number.

So when the bills aren’t paid or the checks bounce, it’s reported on your credit report. Still other thieves use your name and credit to take out loans for which creditors think you’re responsible.

"If you have a bank account, you're vulnerable," says Cynthia Oberg, an assistant United States attorney in Detroit who's prosecuted many identity theft cases. "I don't think there's anything you can do to completely protect yourself against it."

Consider the case of John Harrison, 42, a retired Army captain in Rocky Hill, Conn. An identity thief armed with a fraudulent military ID card acquired goods, services and cash valued at more than $260,000, including two trucks, a $25,000 Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a time-share vacation place in Hilton Head, S.C.

After the thief wrote bad checks in his name, Harrison's military retirement pay was garnished.

What was a credit identity theft problem turned into a Legal problem.

Your credit standing not only affects your ability to get credit, it often triggers the interest rate at which you can borrow.

It can also affect your ability to purchase insurance or to find employment. Insurance companies and even prospective employers use your credit rating to gauge your sense of responsibility.

Identity Fraud Is An enormous Problem

We live in an age where everything from tax records, medical records, to social security numbers, to credit card data, resides in data banks that can be hacked, phished or pharmed by anyone with enough technical skill.

• It seems like every week we hear of large retailers like D&K Shoes, or
• the T.J. Max identity theft, or Marshalls, whose data bases were hacked
• Or it’s the UCLA ID theft where a data base of thousands of student social security numbers was compromised.
• Or it's a similar case at Ohio State University.
• Or the entire State Of Ohio database of over 64,000 state employees was stolen).
• Or it’s the Federal Government losing tens of millions of veteran’s personal information on a stolen laptop computer.

Although, there's currently no protection against medical ID fraud. There is help for credit identity fraud.

Many states have passed, or are in process of passing laws to block access to credit information. This prevents anyone from accessing your credit information without your authorization. This is good. The downside is when you apply for credit, the credit bureaus will make you pay for each authorization. This makes credit hard to get and expensive.

The most effective deterrent to ID theft is vigilance. ID theft can't be stopped. But the damage it causes can be minimized. The concept is searched for online variously as, Search Stolen ID, Check Stolen ID, Check Stolen Identity, or Green Flag identity Fraud.

It actually exists in a service sold as the Identity Shield by Prepaid Legal, Inc. One aspect of this service is credit monitoring. Your credit file is monitored 24/7 for signs of unusual or fraudulent activity.