Identity theft is soaring, having doubled in frequency since 2019 to become the second most reported complaint according to the Federal Trade Commission. Today nearly every American has had their personal information breached at least once, and the likelihood is high that you will experience an effort to steal your identity at some point, perhaps more than once. But there are steps you can take to mitigate the risk and to act quickly to repair the damage in the event you do eventually fall victim.
For as long as human beings have maintained unique individual identities, crooks have sought to abscond with them. Early brutal examples involved the murder of the victim and the assumption of their physical identity by the criminal in order to evade the law or previous associates. Financial fraudsters quite literally dug through the trash or created elaborate telephone schemes to elicit enough information from the victim to liquidate their bank accounts. But it took the advent of the internet to fuel the dramatic rise in sophisticated identity theft on a large scale.
The term “identity theft” was actually first used in 1964 and is defined as a crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for personal gain. According to the FTC, there were 1.4 million reported instances of consumer identity theft in 2021, but industry analysts believe that as many as 90% of cases go unreported. Javelin Strategy and Research puts the number of Americans affected by identity fraud at 42 million last year resulting in $52 billion in losses.
It is impossible to fully inoculate yourself from this type of crime given the plethora of personal information about each of us zipping around in the ether. According to one former hacker turned security consultant, the only reason more people haven’t been victimized is that there are simply not enough criminals to utilize all the data in circulation. Still, there are several measures that each of us can take to minimize the chances of an attack.
* Freeze your credit. A credit freeze prevents any potential creditor from accessing your credit file unless you are already a borrower. By law, each of the three bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax) offer this service for free by creating an account and turning the freeze on or off in real time. This is easy and is the most powerful defense against fraudulent establishment of accounts in your name.