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LifeLock for identity theft protection

By admin ⋅ April 5, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Financial identity theft

A classic example of credit-dependent financial crime (bank fraud) occurs when a criminal obtains a loan from a financial institution by impersonating someone else. The criminal pretends to be the victim by presenting an accurate name, address, birth date, or other information that the lender requires as a means of establishing identity. Even if this information is checked against the data at a national credit-rating service, the lender will encounter no concerns, as all of the victim’s information matches the records. The lender has no easy way to discover that the person is pretending to be the victim, especially if an original, government-issued id can’t be verified (as is the case in online, mail, telephone, and fax-based transactions). This kind of crime is considered non-self-revealing, although authorities may be able to track down the criminal if the funds for the loan were mailed to them. The criminal keeps the money from the loan, the financial institution is never repaid, and the victim is wrongly blamed for defaulting on a loan s/he never authorized.

In most cases the financial identity theft will be reported to the national Consumer credit reporting agency or Credit bureaus(US) as a collection or bad loan under the impersonated person’s record. This person may discover the incident by being denied a loan, by seeing the accounts or complaints when they view their own credit history, or by being contacted by creditors or collection agencies. The person’s credit score, which affects one’s ability to acquire new loans or credit lines, will be adversely affected until they are able to successfully dispute the complaints and have them removed from their record.

Other forms of examples of bank fraud associated with identity theft include “account takeovers,” passing bad checks, and “busting out” a checking or credit account with bad check, counterfeit money order, or empty ATM envelope deposits. If withdrawals or checks are made against the impersonated person’s real accounts, that person may need to convince the bank that the withdrawal was fraudulent or file a court case in order to retrieve lost funds. If checks are written against fraudulently opened checking accounts, then the person receiving the checks will suffer the financial loss, however they might try to retrieve money from the impersonated person by using a collection agency which would appear in the person’s credit history until they can show that it was fraud.

The failure of corporate or government organizations to protect consumer privacy, client confidentiality and political privacy has been criticized for facilitating the acquisition of personal identifiers by criminals.

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Tags: identity theft, lifelock, lifelock promo code, protection