WNT: Grappling with Identity Theft

W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 6 -- Maureen won’t let us tell you her last name or even where she lives. She is very cautious.

She and her husband had their identities stolen after someone got her husband’s social security number. That’s all it took.

A Long Trail of Fraud

In September of last year, she got a call from her MasterCard service provider about unusual activity on her account. She canceled her card and wasn’t charged for the purchases. Although she filled out a police report, no one told her to put a fraud alert on her credit reports.

“I was naïve then,” Maureen says. “But now I have a Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks in identity theft.”

Two months later, J.C. Penny’s credit department in New Mexico called. A man using her husband’s social security number had opened a charge account with a nonexistent address. After a few phone calls, Maureen discovered that 25 inquires had been made on their account in the past two months and six address changes filed.

A few days after that, she was contacted by three different Chicago-area banks. They told her that in a period of two hours, a man posing as her husband had requested a total of $45,000 in loans. When the man returned to one of the banks to pick up his loan, detectives arrested him in the parking lot. The man pleaded guilty and was recently sentenced to three years in prison, the maximum amount for a non-violent financial crime.

All told, about a half dozen people attempted to buy $150,000 worth of goods and merchandise using their credit, including two vehicles, a Lincoln Navigator and a Ford Expedition. Even now, Maureen and her husband have no idea how his social security number was stolen in the first place.

And then there’s Jessica, another identity theft victim who suffered a different fate than Maureen. She spent a night in jail after a friend stole her identity.

“This woman has committed several different crimes in my name,” Jessica says, “assault and battery, petty theft, marijuana, not to mention the stuff I don’t even know about.”