Identity Theft is Worse than You Think It Is

As regular readers of this blog know, I follow events relating to identity theft pretty closely. In fact, I post on it so often that many of you probably think the name of this site is Free Money Identity Theft! ;-) 

But Even I was shocked when I ran onto a post by Trey Jackson that detailed how bad it was. She documented every incident she could find in the last 100 days where a company has compromised sensitive consumer data.  This is what her study has yielded to date:

• 1 out of every 6 people in the U.S. has had their personal information breached in the last 100 days. US population = 296,689,763.
• 1 out of every 4 people over the age of 18 have been exposed to identity breaches in the last 100 days. US pop. over 18 = 209,128,094 - That's 24%.
• At this pace, every consumer record in our country will have been exposed/breached/stolen in less than two years.
• 50 million consumers have had their private information breached since 4-08-05

She goes on to list 20 different exhibits that show the range of ID theft -- from hospital records to financial institutions to federal employees and everything in between.

She concludes with the following solutions:

1. We need to require that all consumer data is encrypted. (Currently only 10 percent of businesses encrypt their data.)

2. Stop people from walking around with laptops that have thousands of consumers' information on them.

3. Better computer security to prevent hacking.

4. Shred paper documents.

5. Have strict screening procedures in place for all companies that are applying to pull credit reports and/or use any consumer database.

What do you think needs to be done? What are you doing personally?

Comments

[mbhunter]

I had a $15 charge on my CC for someone's rechargeable cell phone card. Now I check my charges more carefully.

Also, new parents, check out that your kids' identities haven't been stolen! Not even two and this girl's had her's stolen not once, but twice!

http://tinyurl.com/bja7d

[Trey Jackson]

I'm glad you enjoyed (well, I'm sure you do not enjoy my findings...) but rather, found my post informative. The only way we will be able to shed light on the atrocities being committed against the average consumer is to continue to help people understand what's really happening and get them involved in the process of stopping this.

One thing I would like to correct though: I am a male, not a female. But with two of us writing on the site ( me and Atlas-who is female) I can understand the confusion.

best wishes,

Trey