Abagnale: Top Tips to Prevent Identity Theft and Fraud
If you haven't been a victim of identity theft or fraud, it is because thieves haven't gotten to you yet.
Thu, May 24, 2007
CIO — Forty years ago, few people could have predicted that identity theft would become as big an epidemic as it is today. Few could have imagined protecting your ID would mean taking mail to the post office instead of leaving it in our mailboxes for pickup, shredding documents before throwing them in the trash, or that a $2 pen could help prevent a crime.
Amid this epidemic, we see more and more people become faceless victims -- victims of identity theft. Powerless, we waste countless hours and money recovering from what was taken from us -- our name, our credit, our money -- essentially, our lives. The problem is we are a reactive society. We wait until a problem surfaces before seeking a solution.
We need to find ways to protect ourselves before identity theft strikes. We can make drastic improvements toward diminishing this crime, but it will never disappear altogether. If you haven't been a victim of identity theft, it is because thieves haven't gotten to you yet. If things fail to change, your turn will come. Prevention is not simply a matter of following a checklist of tips, it is about education -- the primary factor in protecting ourselves.
While more and more people are using online banking, America's 78 million Baby Boomers, who make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, continue to be a paper-driven majority. This group also accounts for 30 percent of fraud victims, as estimated by Consumer Action, a consumer-advocacy group.
A check holds all of the information needed to steal your identity: name, address, bank account, routing number. If written with a ball point pen, information can easily be removed by a process called check washing, a common form of identity theft. It is the process of taking a check or document that has already been filled out, removing the ink with a regular household chemical, then re-writing in a new dollar amount and recipient. If you are careless, your personal check could contribute to the 1.2 million fraudulent checks written every day. That's more than 13 per second.
The American Bankers Association states that check fraud is growing 25 percent per year. To slow this growth, we need to understand how it works. I know firsthand how easy it is to perform check fraud. About 40 years ago, I cashed $2.5 million in fraudulent checks in every state and 26 foreign countries over a five-year period. I was involved in a high-stakes game of stolen identities. And to know how easy it can be to perform, I know it is just as easy to prevent.
