Study: Identity theft keeps climbing
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Identity theft victims are also losing more money and getting less of it back, research shows.
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Identity thieves are typically young, work solo and rely on the Internet for fewer than one-fifth of their crimes, according to a new study of Secret Service cases.
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For the second time in over a year, a high profile figure has had his identity stolen after publicly releasing his own financial information. Is identity theft really this easy?
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When Michelle Brown, a corporate  banker outside of Los Angeles, filled out paperwork for an  apartment rental, little did she realize that financial details  offered to a landlord would lead to identity theft that plagued  five years of her life.
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Thousands of credit card numbers and other personal data may have been compromised.
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More than 3.5 million Americans were victims of phishing scams and online identity theft in the year that ended in August, a 57% increase over 2006, according to Gartner fraud analyst Avivah Litan.
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Increasing concerns about identity theft are driving a growing number of counties to start redacting personal data from public records on their Web sites. But the work remains challenging.
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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 on Thursday shows.
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State officials say it&#39;s not clear if names and Social Security numbers were accessed or stolen but urge individuals to take precautions against identity theft.
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New Yorkers, especially around New  York City, and Californians, especially around Los Angeles, are  more likely to be targets of identity theft, according to a new  study.
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People who use internet networking sites are being warned that they could be at risk of identity theft.
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Online tricksters looking to dupe consumers out of credit card numbers and other personal information have netted about $500 million from their hapless victims in the US, a national study released Wednesday showed.
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LOS ANGELES - California university officials have warned nearly 600,000 students and faculty that they might be exposed to identity theft following incidents where computer hard drives loaded with their private information were lost or hacked into.
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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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The number of reported ID thefts dips, but it still accounts for more than a third of complaints to FTC.
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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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TAMPA, Fla., June 19  /PRNewswire/ -- Computers may have sensitive data that identity thieves would love to get their hands on. Magnets, degaussers, and other x-ray or magnetic techniques do not work, even the large bulk eraser magnets are not effective.