“If someone put a gun to my head right here and took $1,700 from my wallet, you’d call the police,” I said indignantly.
“Certainly,” replied the bank officer. “But we don’t in these cases.”
I did. Right there. I dialed 911, and an NYPD officer came to the bank lobby, where I reported a theft of $1,700. The policeman smiled, while various bank officials acted as if I were Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon.” My little gambit got their attention, but not their commitment to spend any time or money trying to crack my case.
Several weeks later an officer from a distant suburb called to say that local police had found a man with checks in his possession with our names printed on them. But the bank wasn’t interested in pursuing it, and both the D.A. and the Feds took a pass. “The amount is just too small to prosecute,” a harried detective told me. Apparently, crime does pay–if you steal small enough.
That was five years ago, and I now have more company among the victimized than I ever imagined possible. According to the Justice Department, 500,000 to 700,000 Americans a year have their identities stolen. When thieves succeed in extracting money, the average loss is $18,000, though banks and credit-card companies usually reimburse anything over $50, then pass along the cost in higher interest rates and other fees. The average amount of time needed to straighten out the situation: a year and a half. The Federal Trade Commission says that identity theft is now its No. 1 consumer complaint, accounting for an astounding 42 percent of all reports of fraud.
Who’s responsible? After worrying for years about hackers, many institutions are now focused more on inside jobs, like the one last week in New York. Federal authorities cracked what they call the largest identity-theft case in American history. More than 30,000 people were victimized when a former employee of a Long Island software company–one of those guys we trust on the “help desk”–sold personal information to a ring of Nigerians in the Bronx.
The real pressure to crack down didn’t come until after 9-11. “People now understand that identity theft can be a gateway to other crimes, including terrorism,” says Jonathan J. Rusch of the Justice Department. We can’t stop terrorism until we know who is living here, and we can’t know that until we know their real names.
Prevention is the key. It wasn’t until this year that the Social Security Administration took Social Security numbers off the envelopes of recipients, where they could be easily stolen. Many businesses still ask for your number for transactions, and many consumers are foolish enough to provide it. Stephen Keating of the Privacy Foundation says the Social Security number has been a dangerous “skeleton key” ever since the late 1930s, when a secretary in a Lockport, N.Y., wallet manufacturer became the first known victim of identity theft. Her number was printed on a sample Social Security card inside the company’s wallets, which were sold at Woolworths and elsewhere. Thousands of retirees used her number as their own.
The experts have some advice for lessening identity theft, including reviewing financial statements closely, shredding credit-card receipts and financial documents before throwing them out and obtaining your own credit reports at least once a year (start with freecreditreport.com). Many thieves use phony change-of-address cards, so lighter-than-normal mail often signals trouble.
But even if you prove you’ve been victimized, the chances of getting justice are still remote. That’s because, as I found in my own case, the laws on the books just aren’t getting properly enforced, which means that while people like me get their money back, the thief is still out there to prey on someone else. At a minimum, financial institutions should be required to pursue identity-fraud cases, instead of writing them off as a cost of doing business. Then maybe the authorities could crack more cases like the one last week, and keep those like me from having to lose it in the lobby.
