We’ve established that ID thieves might not be who you think they are, but the Associated Press reports that they might even be the people who are supposed to help you.
In Virginia Beach, a nurse faces charges that he stole a credit card from a dead man, the AP reports. He used the card to buy a laptop computer and a security camera revealed footage of a man in scrubs (note to future nurse-thieves: ditch the scrubs) buying a laptop. The wife of the deceased called to cancel the card, only to find that it had been used six hours after he died.
The nurse, Michael Wiseman, 24, was fired on Monday, the AP reports, and faces one count of credit-card theft and one count of credit-card fraud. And numerous counts of being intensely strange.
Check out other info about identity theft and how to protect yourself here.
-Mary Pilon
Illustration credit
Yesterday, I checked myself into a JetBlue flight by just waving my credit card under a nifty red scanner. Even after repeated check-ins like this, I still feel a brief rush of Star-Trek glee fused with not having to show my embarrassing 16-year-old mug to another disgruntled airline employee yet again.
The card’s seemingly magic properties come from its radio frequency ID tag (RFID). Other examples include EZ Passes, the new U.S. Passports and PayPass cards used in the New York subway system.
Enter personal finance. In this BoingBoing TV video, Xeni Jardin has her RFID-enabled American Express card hacked by a pro, Pablos Holman.
As the video points out, you don’t need to worry about this kind of credit card threat for a while. The paranoid among us could wrap cards in tin foil or use a stainless steel wallet (comfy!), but the takeaway is that RFID security has a scary future. “There are more and more ways to leak that information without knowing it,” Jardin says. To which the hacker Holman replies; “with a bigger antennae hooked to this, I can go into Starbucks and get the name of everybody there.”
As if the economy wasn’t hard enough to figure out, this is yet another thing that consumers shouldn’t have to deal with, but we do. Find out what kind of security protection the cards in your wallet have and don’t have and if necessary, demand more security from the card companies–you deserve it.Also–and this goes without saying–beware of any geeks who come near your derrière with one of those weird card reading devices.
-Mary Pilon
There’s a new motive for identity theives – getting into an elite university.
Whether it’s supporting a meth addiction, a shopping spree or just trying to pull a weekend at Bernie’s, identity theft is usually a tip of the criminal iceberg.
And thanks to 29-year-old Esther Elizabeth Reed, cops are unearthing an Ivy-League identity scandal. CBS reports that cops arrested Reed in suburban Chicago for committing ID theft to gain admission to Columbia, Harvard and California State at Fullerton to study – get this - criminology and psychology.
Reed racked up over $100,000 in loans using various sophisticated identity schemes, according to MSNBC. While studying as a graduate student at Columbia for two years, she masqueraded under the name Brooke Henson. But according to CBS, the real Brooke Henson is from South Carolina and has been missing since 1999 (cops don’t think that Reed had anything to do with Henson’s disappearance).
Officials aren’t sure yet how Reed got her hands on Hanson’s social-security number and other pertinent information. But Reed used Hanson’s identity to obtain an Ohio identification card, and then took a high school equivalency test and the SAT. Her score eventually landed her at Columbia University, reports MSNBC.
Another alias that Reed used was Jennifer Myers, primarily as an account name for instant messaging. A tipster who had IM’d with her eventually brought her down, according to MSNBC.
The moral of the story? Identity thieves are just becoming more and more clever. Protect yourself buy checking your credit report regularly and considering a credit freeze. And be especially suspect if you suddenly discover that you’ve received an Ivy League masters degree without ever having set foot on campus.
-Mary Pilon
Illustration credit
French author Colette mused decades ago that January was “the month of empty pockets.” She must have known that this seemingly normal week during the dawn of 2008 would be packed with bizarre identity thievery like no other.
In New York City, two elderly men tried to take a friend in to cash a $355 Social-Security check. Doesn’t sound like identity theft, except for the fact that the friend was dead. They clothed the corpse, strapped him to an office chair and wheeled him to the nearest check-cashing store, only to be caught by a New York detective who happened to be sitting down for some grub at Empanada Mama next door. Too bad they didn’t make it to the beach house. (more…)
Although Mr. Freeze was a lame Batman villain, you can now use chilling powers for financial good.
As Ron pointed out a couple of months ago, putting a security freeze on your credit report prevents new creditors from accessing your credit file without your permission. Credit freezes used to only be available in certain states, but now all three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) will let you freeze your credit report regardless of where you live in the U.S.
Why would you want to put on the big chill? (more…)
Most of us know somebody who’s fallen victim to identity theft. But we know next to nothing about all of the thieves.
A report from the Center for Identity Management and Information Protection at Utica College turns the lens on the perps. Out this week, the survey examines completed U.S. Secret Service investigations for patterns.
Some highlights:
They’re Not (Just) Bad Guys: One-third of the offenders were female.
A Lot Of Them Are Cowards: A good chunk of the offenders (42.4%) worked in groups. (more…)
Last week brought the welcome news that all three of the companies that track your credit history are going to start letting you freeze your credit file, no matter where you live in the U.S.
Credit freezes are the closest thing we have to a silver bullet against identity theft. Once your account is frozen, no new creditors can check you out unless you go back in and thaw the account temporarily with a special code.
Banks and credit-granting companies generally won’t open a new account in your name unless they can check the credit file. If a credit-card issuer can’t access the credit file (say, when a crook is trying to get a new card in your name), the card company simply won’t open the account. (more…)
Kudos to our corporate cousins at Dow Jones Newswires, who ran a story explaining how a hapless employee of a Citigroup unit managed to expose over 5,000 customer social security numbers and assorted other personal data. Turns out she seems to have loaded a file-sharing program — you know, the kind you use to steal music – onto her work laptop. Once online, all sorts of stuff became available from the machine — including those social security numbers she had loaded on there for work.
This is a real easy thing to avoid folks — Don’t use your work computer for anything but work. And definitely don’t use it for stealing music, sharing files with strangers or anything else that could cause you to end up in a story like this one.
– Ron Lieber
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