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Combating Identity Theft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the who-am-i dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Net-Security is running an interesting article about some of the problems facing organizations when it comes to identity theft. From the article: 'Identity theft is the major security concern facing organizations today. Indeed, for the banking industry, it is the number one security priority for 2006. Identity security has developed beyond the simplest form of authentication where one party issues and verifies identities within a closed group of users. While easy to do, this approach is extremely hard and costly to scale upwards and offers no interoperability with other authentication networks.'"

2 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. They're not helping themselves by Kombat · · Score: 5, Informative

    A big part of the problem is that the banking industry isn't always taking advantage of their own safety checks. For example, take a look at these stories to see how merchants pretty much ignore the signatures on the back of credit cards.

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  2. Lenders are liable for ID theft, not victims by max+born · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was a victim of ID theft 5 years ago. A credt card company (Next Card IIRC) gave someone a credit card who had only my name and SS#, wrong date of birth and wrong address. Anyway this guy went to Vegas and ran up quite a bill. It was only when the card remained unpaid that the company bothered to track down the real me.

    They wanted me to sign an affidavit. I told them I wan't signing anything, it wasn't my problem. I quoted the following from CHAP. 41, SUBCHAP VI, sections b and e of U.S. Code TITLE 15 which states:

    (b) Burden of proof
    In any action which involves a consumer's liability for an unauthorized electronic fund transfer, the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to show that the electronic fund transfer was authorized or, if the electronic fund transfer was unauthorized, then the burden of proof is upon the financial institution to establish that the conditions of liability set forth in subsection (a) of this section have been met, and, if the transfer was initiated after the effective date of section 1693c of this title, that the disclosures required to be made to the consumer under section 1693c(a)(1) and (2) of this title were in fact made in accordance with such section.

    (e) Scope of liability
    Except as provided in this section, a consumer incurs no liability from an unauthorized electronic fund transfer.

    Anyway, they took care of everything after that. Including my credit rating.