Despite a drop in cases, Californians last year suffered sharply larger financial losses from identity theft, according to a study Wednesday by a statewide consumer group, which urged authorities to do more to prevent individual Social Security numbers from winding up in the wrong hands.
“California state law prohibits organizations, both private and public, from using a Social Security number as a personal identifier and from publicly posting or displaying that number,” said the California Public Interest Research Group’s report. “Yet organizations continue to collect and store Social Security numbers, unnecessarily placing consumers at risk of identity theft.”
http://liarcatchers.com/identity_theft_investigation.html
The nonprofit group appealed to state officials to “investigate the present usage of Social Security numbers by government agencies and private business to determine if alternative means of identification can be used instead.”
While the report found a significant drop in the number of reported victims from 2010 to 2011, the group’s consumer advocate, Jon Fox, said that was due to a few huge cases in 2010 skewing the data. However, the report also noted that the average loss among victims soared in 2011 over the previous year.
Citing Federal Trade Commission statistics, it found that the amount stolen per California identity theft victim was 4.8 percent higher in 2011 than in 2010, while data from the state’s High Technology Theft Apprehension and Prosecution program revealed
Advertisement
a more dramatic increase. It showed the average loss was $786 in 2011, compared with $82 in 2010.
The trend has caught the attention of Ronnie Lopez, a San Jose police sergeant and operations manager of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, which investigates ID theft and other tech crimes in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties.
While he didn’t have long-term data on the average amount pilfered in ID thefts, “it seems like it’s progressively gotten worse the last three or four years,” he said, adding that the fraud poses “a very real and prolific threat to our community.”
By stealing a person’s Social Security number, birth date, bank account information or other personal facts, identity thieves can withdraw money from the victim’s bank accounts, hijack their government tax refunds and cause other financial havoc.
One of the biggest reasons the amount of losses has increased is a rise in “new account fraud,” the report said. That’s where crooks use the victim’s stolen identity to obtain new credit cards, often using a phony address to avoid detection. Such fraud costs the average victim $3,197 per incident, the report said.
Other types of fraud were perpetrated via the Internet, often by sending bogus emails that tricked recipients into sharing their sensitive information. Another troublesome scheme is “skimming,” where crooks use a small electronic device to steal credit and debit-card information at places where the cards are used for transactions.
One recent case the report cited involved Gervork Aroutiounyan and Gnel Snapyan, who were sentenced in March for stealing $320,728 by skimming bank ATM cards in Santa Clara and six other California counties from July 2010 to February 2011. The two, who plead guilty and were sentenced in March, installed micro-cameras to capture the card holders’ PIN number. Then they used the purloined information to make fake ATM cards and withdraw money from the victims’ accounts, the report said.
