Uncle Sam's coming crackdown on ID theft
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Attorney Eric J. Sinrod says the federal government is finally taking steps to combat  identity theft.
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The US government unveiled plans on Thursday for a revised computer-based program using personal information to identify airline passengers who may pose a threat to air travel.
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New federal regulations designed to speed up the processing of checks went into effect on Thursday, and consumer advocates advised Americans to be more vigilant about monitoring their accounts.
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U.S. officials are expected to  announce on Monday a coordinated crackdown on the theft of U.S.  intellectual property such as pirated compact discs and  knockoff auto parts, the Wall Street Journal reported on  Monday,
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QUINCY, Mass. - John Russo has been a victim of identity theft. So when he was asked to fork over a photo ID just to be seated at an IHOP pancake restaurant, he flipped.
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The Bush administration and New York cut a deal Saturday to create a new generation of super-secure driver's licenses for U.S. citizens, but also allow illegal immigrants to get a version.
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The worry used to be that illegal immigrants were stealing welfare. Then it was jobs. Now, we're told, they're stealing people's identities.
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By Paul Wenske, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Jun. 8--If you're like lots of Americans, you're increasingly wary of identity theft.
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If you&#39;re a convicted identity thief, you&#39;ve got about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail time.That&#39;s one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service&#39;s data. The study&#39;s authors based their findings on an&#160;analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases.&quot;Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,&quot; the report said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time.Identity theft is concentrated in the northeastern and southern United States, the study found. And the majority of the offenders in the Secret Service cases were African-American; more than two-thirds of all offenders were male.The study also found that ID thieves tended to hit people that they did not know, rather than preying on friends and relatives. A family member or friend was the victim in 16 percent of cases. In about a third of the cases, the theft was an inside job, with the data being stolen from an employer.Identity theft is a well-studied phenomenon, but it&#39;s unusual for a survey to be based on this kind of closed-case data. &quot;This study is significant because it did not depend on self-reported or survey data,&quot; the authors wrote.The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service&#39;s Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Total losses: $13 million. &quot;In general,&quot; however, &quot;the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,&quot; the study stated.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.&#160;
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Blog: Panel approves a bill that backers say will help fix the problem of Social Security number misuse and identity theft. But it has a long and uphill battle to go before it becomes law.
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City officials approved a plan Monday to offer illegal immigrants identification cards that would let them open bank accounts and use other services that may be unavailable without driver's licenses or state-issued IDs.
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New identity checks are to be introduced to safeguard homeowners against property fraud.
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By subjecting most visitors to scans of  their faces and fingers, the United States will this week  expand a mass surveillance system that threatens freedom and  race relations, a privacy watchdog says.
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A new RFID-chipped passport card that can be read up to 30 feet away -- and on which the data's not encrypted -- has drawn censure from the Centers for Democracy and Technology, which foresees covert location tracking and an increase in ID theft on the horizon. (If you filed an objection to this program already, by the way, the government says you just don't understand it.)
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State officials warned California residents Wednesday to take preventative steps against ID theft after an unknown hacker gained access to a database at the University of California, Berkeley.
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That plastic card, the one with the lousy photo that's jammed into your wallet or purse, isn't just a license to drive. It's the green light to buy a drink, the ticket to federal benefits, the must-have document to get aboard airplanes. Now it's also the flash point for an argument about how best to balance America's security needs with worries that personal privacy could be swept away.
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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut  - As many U.S. cities and states arrest illegal immigrants in raids and toughen laws against them, a Connecticut city is offering to validate them under a controversial, first-in-the-nation ID card program.