Identity Theft: What to Do

You mean you didn't get a $ 500 tatoo in L.A. this morning?

You've just had a nice lunch and then your waitress informs you that your credit card was denied and you know your account was current the last time you checked. Or... you are receiving phone calls from companies you don't normally do business with. Alarms should be going off. Somebody has been trying to live off your credit. There is a lot of this going on these days. What to do? Call your creditors, call the state police, call your friends, call you mom, call freecreditreport.com! Fortunately, credit card companies are very proactive on this and if your credit card was denied they are likely already on the case. They suspend charges when they see suspicious activity.


You still need to call them and work on this yourself, however, because the fraud units of the credit card companies have a lot of cases to work and you may have exposure to other losses. The violator may be applying for credit elsewhere with information he has obtained on you. One recent case involved a violator who subscribed to Monster.com so that he could obtain resumes and personal information to match up with accounts he had stolen. So beware how much information you share on Monster.com and other web vehicles, ie. Facebook, My Space, etc. Also, get a copy of your credit report and check it out. If the violator has applied for credit in your name, you can have the credit reporting agency remove that from your record. The number on inquiries into your credit history can be a factor in your credit rating. Inquiries caused by fraudulent activity are required to be removed upon your request.

Calling the state police is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, hopefully it could lead to the apprehension of the violator and the removal of a threat to the security of other accounts. Secondly, the state police can be very helpful to you in substantiating your efforts to correct your credit record and any other damage caused by the violator. A client of mine once found that his identity had been stolen through correspondence from IRS. The IRS was dunning him for unpaid taxes which resulted from a W-2 omitted from his return. Upon further investigation, my client found that the identity thief had actually worked a job using my client's identity. The state police investigation was helpful in the effort to substantiate my client's story and help him convince IRS that he did not owe the taxes. The state police investigation was also helpful in the effort to close unwanted credit accounts the perpetrator had established.

How does this happen? There are a number of possibilities. The number of unsecure home wireless networks in this country is incalculable. Anyone within the range of your unprotected router can a) get internet service for free, 2) use bandwith allocated to your house thereby slowing down your usage, and c) possibly send malicious e-mails or other attacks which would for all intents and purposes look like they originate with you. These are undesirable results, but consider the even more undesirable exposure of your private internet usernames and passwords to theft by the interloper. Secure your home network with an encrypted password and don't use public computers for your personal business transactions.

Other possibilities for leaks of your personal identity to criminals include unscrupulous use of your information by employees or others with access to the records on the creditor's side of the transaction. Not much you can do about those risks. That's the job of law enforcement.

By working with the authorities and your creditors to do what you can to track down these deadbeats, you will help to make the internet safe for the rest of us.

McAfee Meltdown

On April 21 thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of computers automatically downloaded a faulty update to virus protection software which identified key windows operating files as a virus. The affected computers immediately lost internet connections and most were inoperable as a result of the affliction.

McAffee's chief executive posted an apology around midnight the day following the disaster in a blog that was not linked from the main McAfee page, but buried somewhere on the back pages. I only found it as a result of the excellent reporting of the incident by Declan McCullagh of Cnet.com.

See the main article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003074-83.html.

The powers that be at McAfee finally did take action to help affected users on the main McAfee web site by Tuesday of the following week and possibly earlier, but if you had not already received help fixing your computer you would not have been able to access their site anyway.

Fortunate for us in my office, we did not have all of our eggs in one basket. There were only three computers in our office disabled by this faulty McAfee update. There were three others with Norton installed which were unaffected. One of these was used to access the Cnet.com site to discover what the problem was. We know a great IT guy who got us up and running again by the next morning.

The purpose of this post is to publicize the actions of McAfee in failing to take responsibility for this problem earlier and to thank those responsible for helping us cope with the problem. If you have never read Cnet.com stories before I would encourage you to check them out and see what you can learn. The information available there can be quite technical, but there is much informaion there that is accessible to non-technical users.

Thanks Declan McCullah, thanks Cnet.com, and thanks to Doug Turpin.