Identity theft prevention is not a one-time solution. You must accumulate layers of privacy and security over time. The following identity theft prevention tips are among those I cover in one of my keynote speeches.
Earlier this week the Feds cracked down on one of the largest credit car theft rings ever. The ring created 7,000 false identities to obtain 25,000 credit cards. Then they ran the scam through real businesses in on the whole thing, in addition to 80 bogus companies using more than 1,800 addresses, according to the FBI.
Through a series of identity theft and fraudulent actions, they were swimming in the hard-earned cash of millions of other people and business owners like Scrooge McDuck did backstrokes in piles of gold.
“This is, as far as we can tell, one of the largest, if not the largest, credit card fraud cases ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said at a news conference earlier this week in Newark, New Jersey. “We have already documented losses of $200 million, and that number could quite well go higher.”
You should take five minutes to understand Java browser threat before it undermines your security. The internet has become much like the Wild Wild West, where individuals play by their own rules and do as they please. Think of hackers as being malicious like Mongo from “Blazing Saddles,” but as smart and cunning as the most nefarious of Bond villains. It all reads like a bad Hollywood script until you get hit.
These outlaws of the digital age have turned their attention to your browser, and specifically to Oracle Corp’s Java software, continuing their efforts to victimize unsuspecting individuals who think they’re surfing the net safely. According to a recent Reuters report, the company is hard at work on a software update meant to address a critical security flaw that would allow hackers to infect your computer, possibly even taking control of it and using it in an attack on another server.
Too often we hear about what steps people should take after they have been victims of identity theft and fraud. That’s like telling a batter to wear a helmet after he’s been hit in the head by a baseball.
In a recent news report from a local Fox affiliate in Florida, Jackson Hewitt tax preparer Jessica Douglas said she constantly sees instances of fraud when people come to her to file their returns. Many of these individuals don’t even realize that they have been victimized until months later when they’re sitting at her desk and are blindsided with the news. The Internal Revenue Service sends back a rejection notice, which signifies that someone else has already used your Social Security number to file a return.
Now, Douglas says the IRS will give you a personal identification number that supposedly makes it more difficult for villainous types to steal your identity. But, once again, the catch is that you have to have already been victimized once before you can get a PIN.
Every dollar counts, now more than ever, as the government searches for ways to wisely spend our money. It’s dismaying to learn that an audit report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has found that the impact of identity theft on tax administration is significantly greater than the amount the IRS detects and prevents. Even worse, the “IRS uses little of the data from identity theft cases…to detect and prevent future tax refund fraud” according to Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.
The IRS is detecting far fewer fake tax returns than are actually falsely filed. 938,700 were detected in 2011. On the other hand, TIGTA identified 1.5M additional undetected tax returns in 2011 with potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling in excess of $5.2B.
The study predicted that the IRS stands to lose $21B in revenue over the next 5 years with new fraud controls, or $26B without the new controls.
You may think your deceased loved ones are safe from having their identities stolen. Not true! The Death Master File contains data about millions of deceased people including the full name, Social Security number and other personal information. Though you’d think this would be carefully guarded, the Social Security Administration provides the file to the Department of Commerce’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS). NTIS, in turn, distributes it to more than 450 entities including state and local governments, hospitals, universities, financial institutions, insurance companies and genealogy services. Even worse, anyone can access the information through the NTIS website. The cost? $10 for one person or an annual subscription with unlimited access to all of the files of deceased individuals costs $995.
Allowing our children the innocence of their childhood is paramount to us as parents. Because our children are pretty much the center of our universe, we want to do everything in our power to keep them safe and to safeguard their futures. In this information age, identity theft has become global in its reach and can have devastating consequences for our children’s futures if we’re not vigilant from the day they acquire a Social Security number.
Why are our kids, the very people we most want to protect, so vulnerable? Because they have unused, unblemished credit profiles. Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Mellon CyLab, recently published the first ever child identity theft report based on identity protection scans of over 40,000 U.S. children. It is extremely alarming that 10.2% of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security numbers. That figure is 51 times higher than the rate for adults of the same population.
The IRS admittedly has little control over protecting your tax returns against identity theft. The problem is too big, the data too widely available, prevention too rarely attended to until it’s already too late. Your tax returns are the Holy Grail of identity theft because they contain virtually every piece of information a fraudster needs to BECOME you. But you don’t have to be a victim; you simply need to take responsibility for what is rightfully yours – your tax return information and your identity. The changes aren’t difficult, they simply require you read through this document so that you recognize the risks. Once that’s done, you simply avoid the highest-risk behaviors.
Here is a comprehensive list of frauds, scams and high risk tax-time practices.
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Identity theft prevention is not a one-time solution. You must accumulate layers of privacy and security over time. The following identity theft prevention tips are among those I cover in one of my keynote speeches.
