Identity Theft Stories are in the news every day and new types of identity theft are surfacing as well. With a reported 8 to 15 million annual victims of identity theft over the last few years there are numerous identity theft stories on the internet. Our goal is to provide you with details of various cases to help educate you so that you can protect yourself from becoming a victim. We hope that the information provided will give you valuable insight into this type of fraud so we can begin to eliminate these crimes so you do not become another one of the many identity theft statistics!
Here are some real-world examples of what you may have to deal with if you become a victim of identity theft.
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A women from Las Vegas reported that her Doctors employee stole her personal information from a medical file. This included copies of her drivers license along debit card. The thief used the debit card to empty her bank account and the license to obtain a cell phone in her name.
The women was on disability and the thief used her social security number on employment paperwork. Because of this she lost a year and a half of back pay which had been approved for the disability.
Eventually authorities caught up with the two employees after they stole $42,000 from the doctor.
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A Woodbine Georgia Sheriff recently shared his identity theft story. When he tried to use his personal debit card, it was declined twice. First at a car wash, then at his credit union’s ATM machine.
Someone, somehow, somewhere had stolen his card information, “cloned” the debit card, then used it to ring up nearly $300 in charges over a 12-hour period in New York City and a Walmart in Houston.
The card had been cloned while the officer still had the real card in his wallet. The process known as skimming is the copying of a card number with a small electronic device with a built-in magnetic strip reader. The thief or an accomplice simply swipes the card through the device, which then copies the information contained on the card into the device’s memory. That information including any security holograms is then copied onto a counterfeit card for the thief’s use.
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A man in Florida was on his way to a friends house for dinner when he was pulled over. When he inquired as to why he had been stopped the officer replied that there was a warrant for his arrest. The man could not believe what the officer had said and asked him again and he repeated the same.
He was asked to step out of the vehicle and was proceeded to have his miranda rights read. After he was placed in the rear of the cruiser the officer showed him the computer screen with all his information except his real name was used as an alias, the drivers license number was his along with the social security number. Things that were different were that the screen showed a different name and he was much shorter in height.
This all came about because the man’s wallet had been stolen from his truck over a year and a half before the traffic stop. The violation the brought on the warrant was in Arizona, a state the victim had never been too.
The police wanted to send the man to Arizona to face the charges. After spending the night in jail the man was cleared after his fingerprints were found to not match the prints in the Arizona case.
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An upstate New York man was arrested for stealing his deceased father’s identity to use his credit accounts. He was arrested on 2 counts of Grand Larceny, 1 count each of Identity Theft, Scheme to Defraud and 1 count of Petit Larceny, by the New York State Police.
Police say that he used his deceased father’s credit to purchase over $13,000 in merchandise from June 2008 thru January 2010. The complaints came from Bank of America, Citi Bank and Community Bank.
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In early 2009 Heartland Payment Systems of New Jersey disclosed that intruders hacked into the computers it uses to process 100 million credit card payment transactions per month for 175,000 merchants.
Robert Baldwin, Heartland’s president and CFO, said in a USA TODAY interview that the intruders breached and had access to Heartland’s system for “longer than weeks” in late 2008. The number of victims is unknown. “We just don’t have the information right now,” Baldwin said. Security experts said the breach could set a record.
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The Federal Reserve recently revealed that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was a victim of identity theft.
Mr. Bernanke’s wife was in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill when her purse was stolen. It contained personal checks, four credit cards and personal identification, according to the police report.
A few days later a man walked into a Bank of America branch in Maryland and deposited a $900 check under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Bernanke into a third person’s account and then withdrew $9,000 from that person’s account, using other stolen identities.
When he spotted unusual bank transactions, Mr. Bernanke reported them to the bank. The Bernankes didn’t lose any money as a result of the theft.
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These are all examples of various types of identity theft, as you can see identity theft is a very real problem and can happen to anyone. We hope that our stories and other information provide on this site will give you valuable insight into this problem. Furthermore we want to prevent you from becoming another victim and showing up in our identity theft stories. Please check back on a regular basis as we will be adding more stories and informational content on a regular basis.
At identitytheftstories.net we look to these sites and others for further information about identity theft related issues and solutions. We hope that you will find them useful as well.
ID Theft: What College Students Need to Know - CBS News
FightIDTheft - Twitter
2identitytheft - Twitter
Identity Theft - State of Michigan
Small businesses should ensure insurance coverage for ...
AllClear ID - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Twitter / @shannagordon/identitytheft
Page 2: Las Vegas Identity Theft Case Ends After 15 Years - ABC ...
