Information on identity theft and penalty

In this post I am including some facts on identity theft and penalty. Hope this information will make the reader feel secured and safe. You can always visit your state’s official website to know what is the identity theft and penalty in your state. I am just trying to provide a generalized idea about it.

Penalties on identity theft vary from state to state. It is obvious that there will be a series of charges on identity theft since it is not always a black and white issue. Now the question may come in your mind is what the penalty will be like!

The criminal may have to pay compensation equal to the loss incurred for the identity theft. All other damages that might have happened for the loss and the fees given to the attorney for the case may also be charged from the identity theft criminal.

More serious the case is more severe the identity theft penalty. The identity theft and penalty is equally proportional. The more severe the crime more is the amount of identity theft penalty. Well I think this is fair enough.

Do you know how much the penalty can raise upto?

Well it can be $50,000 fine with a imprisonment of 5 years or $100,000 and a imprisonment of 10 years.

Hope this information will make the identity theft criminals to think back before planning an identity theft fraud. For past few years the ID fraud crimes penalty have gotten very harsh.

I will suggest one thing to all my readers the identity theft and penalty will be effective only if the fraud is detected at the right time. If you want to keep yourself save from the identity theft criminals then keep a proper track of your finance. Now-a-days its very easy, you can contact the FTC(Federal Trade Commission) or FACTA(Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) and get a free credit report.

I will request my readers to put in the comment section there own state’s identity theft penalty charges. This will make the other readers aware of the penalties of identity theft.

Posted in Identity Theft | 15 Comments »

Identity theft insurance

While searching on the web about identity theft, I came across some information on identity theft insurance. I really know little about this insurance but wanted to share whatever information I got from my research with my readers.

 It’s really weird of being a victim of identity theft. In most of the cases the victims are unable to identify the reason of identity theft.  The victim knows about the fact after incurring huge losses.

 Another unfortunate situation is that the victim is not able to use the existing credit. He is not able to get a new loan also. The debt collectors often harass them and he may go under criminal investigations or may get arrested also. No one wants to be in such a situation.

Here I want to include the good news. Insurance can cover identity theft.  Few companies’ auto policies and homeowner provides such identity theft services without any extra cost. In this kind of service the victim is guided by a fraud specialist. This fraud specialist helps the victim to restore and protect their identity. In few companies this service is included in the home owner’s insurance policy. This insurance helps an identity theft victim to get his expenses associated with the identity and credit restoration process. He may get reimbursement of the phone bills, lost salaries, certified mailing cost etc.

Hope this will be very helpful for my readers. If anyone of you know more about this service then please let us know about it. I will also try to collect some more information on this topic and will publish in future.

Posted in Identity Theft | 8 Comments »

Practical ways to prevent identity theft

One of my friends asked me to write few ways on how to prevent identity theft. I was planning to include few more case studies on identity theft but due to the request of my friend I am jotting down few points on how we can prevent this crime to happen. The points are all my own view about the topic and the measures that I maintain to avoid this kind of crime to happen. I have also researched a bit on the web and tried to summarize few of them. I will expect some preventive measures from my readers too……

The above are few points that I follow. As I said before that some ideas are taken from some web research. I would like to hear some ideas from my readers. You may include a real life experience and the remedy of that. In my next post I will try to give a case study and few point with that how to avoid such things to happen. Hope that will help my readers.

Posted in Identity Theft | 25 Comments »

Real life Identity Theft (Second case study)

In this digital age identity theft to disappear is a bit tuff thing to happen. You may think why I am making such a verdict. Well, while discussing security can we take the human element out of the equation?There is only one answer to this question and we all know that.

In this post I will be writing about a database administrator and how he commits an identity theft fraud. We all know that a database administrator maintains a database of the confidential records of many individuals. These records can be a good raw material for the identity theft criminals.

William Gary Sullivan was such a kind of administrator. He was the senior administrator in Florida. He was working for Certegy Checking Services, it was a vendor for Fidelity National Information Services. The company had the access to the database of the FNIS (Fidelity National Information Services) customers.

I think it is clear that what kind of records were there in the database. Yes, there were the records of confidential information of the customers. The names, addresses and also the financial account information.

You will be amazed to know that Sullivan sold these records with sophisticated planning. He made a company named S&S Computer Services and sold all the information through this company. Like this the identity theft criminals then passed these confidential records to the marketing companies.

When Sullivan was caught at that time he already sold personal information of 8 million people. Can you guess how much he might have earned out of this scam? Approximately $585,000 ! Huge amount indeed.

Well, I personally feel that dishonesty leads to all this scams. Do anyone suggest how some thing like this can be stopped. I would like to hear from my readers if they have any experience of real life identity theft, and then please let us know.

Posted in Identity Theft | 6 Comments »