Corporate Identity Theft on the Rise

prostoalex writes "As millions of Americans lose their identities to online and offline thieves, a new kind of crime has been cooked up by the criminals who are not bothering with doing pesky credit card charges. They steal entire companies, opening up merchant accounts for existing businesses and running up charges from aforementioned stolen credit card numbers. What's worse, is that the hole the criminals exploit seems to be built into the system. According to Bob Sullivan from MSNBC, "Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential.""

Comments

Fraud != Theft

[Theseus192]

I hate it when the mass media call it "identify theft." If someone impersonates me, he's not taking away my identity, he's committing fraud.

Repeat after me... intangible and intellectual "property" cannot be "stolen." It can only be used in unauthorized ways.

FBI Not Interested?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mistake silence for disinterest (or assent, for that matter).

The FBI could be very interested in the Pakistan and Russian connections. However they are very unlikely to be discussing details of the case with regular civilians.

Or they could be disinterested.

Re:Bring on those people who roll their eyes

[infinite9]

Actually, we tried to have fraud alerts placed in all three credit reporting agencies. The problem is that credit reporting agencies are just as bad (if not worse) than the credit card companies themselves. Since the credit card companies are their customers, and not the people they're gathering information on, they won't actually talk to you. To get a fraud alert, you have to send them a request, in writing. One of the agencies did this immediately. Another did so after a lot of harrassment. The third never did put it on. This was after following all the correct procedures. Once the fraud alerts were on, we ran into them exactly one time while applying for instant credit. In this case, it was a home depot card. The people at the store put me on the phone with their credit department. The woman asked, "Do you know why I'm talking to you?" I mentioned the fraud alert and that was it. Here's your card. No other proof was required. I bought a car without a word from the bank who wrote the loan. Fraud alerts are a joke.

If someone gets your information, you're hosed. There's only one thing you can do. It was modded +5 funny, but another post hit the nail on the head. Burn your credit rating.