ID theft task force recommends national police report
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A preliminary report from the President's Identity Theft Task Force recommends such improvements as a nationally accepted police report for victims to file online, as well as better government data-handling practices and stiffer penalties for thieves.
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The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday will release its latest "Consumer Sentinel" statistical analysis on identity theft, a precursor to a more comprehensive report later this year on ID fraud.
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Internet identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the U.S. today. For five straight years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ranked it as one of the most-reported types of fraud. Despite the increasing awareness of identity theft among consumers and financial institutions, the identity-theft racket shows no signs of slowing. Reported losses from identity theft, currently responsible for over 40 percent of all fraud complaints, approached nearly $300 million last year.
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The FBI said that 160 laptop computers were lost or stolen in less than four years, including at least 10 that contained sensitive or classified information -- one of which held "personal identifying information on FBI personnel," according to a report released yesterday.
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Federal and local authorities, under the auspices of the New York Asset Forfeiture Task Force, have recently served grand-jury subpoenas seeking testimony in the circulationscandals
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NEW YORK -- Americans lost about $49.3 billion in 2006 to criminals who stole their identities, an 11.5 percent decline that may reflect increased vigilance among consumers and businesses, a study released yesterday shows.
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StrikeForce Technologies (OTCBB: SKFT), a company that specializes in the prevention of identity theft, today announced that ten customers have recently signed up to use its Anti-Fraud Prevention Monthly Service to help control their upsurge in Internet-based credit card fraud.
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Millions of veterans and active-duty troops whose sensitive personal information was lost by the Veterans Affairs Department will receive some form of credit protection against identity theft, the government said Wednesday.
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The theft of a laptop containing Social Security numbers of Nashville, Tennessee, area voters is expected to cost local officials about US$1 million as they roll out identity-theft protection to those affected.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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Patrolman Brian Johnson of the Franklin, Mass., Police Department studied a surveillance video showing two men using allegedly stolen credit cards at a Home Depot.But when Johnson didn't recognize either man, he decided to involve people - a lot of them - to help crack the case.
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The FBI had more than 300 weapons and laptops lost or stolen in just under four years, and some of the computers contained sensitive or classified information, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general said on Monday in a highly critical report.
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Identity theft complaints remained a top priority for  U.S. consumers last year, the FTC says.
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U.S. officials said they would unveil on Friday reasonable and inexpensive national requirements to implement an identification-card program critics call a costly invasion of privacy.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Identity theft remained top of mind among U.S. consumers last year, but complaints about Internet auction fraud dropped noticeably, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency last year, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. That number is down slightly from 2005, when ID theft accounted for 37 percent of all complaints. This marks the seventh consecutive year that identity theft has been ranked number one. The second-largest number of complaints, 7 percent, came from consumers who were unhappy with products they had ordered from catalogs. Internet-related complaints were up too. According to the 2006 data, they made up 60 percent of all fraud complaints. Last year, they accounted for 46 percent. But one area of Internet fraud declined noticeably: Internet auctions. In last year's report, complaints relating to products purchased on online auction sites like eBay made up 12 percent of the FTC submissions. In the 2006 numbers released Wednesday, that number had plummeted to 5 percent. The FTC has made identity theft a priority over the past few years, and the agency maintains a Web site where consumers can learn how to protect themselves and file complaints if they've been victimized. The FTC is also one of the agencies heading up the U.S. government's Identity Theft Task Force, created by President George Bush in 2006. "It's not surprising to me that identity theft is number one because we're the ID theft clearinghouse," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. The fact that the FTC saw a slight drop in the percentage of its complaints that related to ID fraud appears to back upÂ a downward trend reported last week by Javelin Research. The research firm said that ID fraud was down in the U.S. with the cost of this type of crime dropping 12 percent in 2006. The FTC stressed that its consumer complaints data is merely anecdotal. However, the agency is working on a more rigorous study of identity fraud trends and is expected to release that data in the coming months. Majoras said it was unclear whether ID fraud is increasing but hopes that the Javelin numbers are right. Her sister was the victim of identity theft recently after falling prey to a phishing attack, she said. "I said to her, 'You can't fall for stuff like that,'" she said. Â
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Data breaches contribute less to ID theft and fraud that most people think, according to a recent survey by Javelin Strategy & Research. Losing your checkbook or wallet is more likely to put you at risk.