A coalition of organizations, including Georgia Watch, begins an initiative fighting back against one of the fasting growing crimes in the nation. Atlanta Victim Assistance, Inc. leads the campaign dubbed Project SAFE, to raise public awareness about identity theft.. Read the rest of this entry »
ID Theft
Credit freeze is the only effective, proactive tool to stop new account fraud, one of the most damaging forms of identity theft. A freeze allows consumers to bar access to their credit files with the three major credit reporting agencies (CRAs), prohibiting identity thieves from fraudulently opening new accounts or lines of credit in a victim’s name. Read the rest of this entry »
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that there are 263,000 individual incidents of identity theft in Georgia each year, which ranks seventh in the nation in victims per capita. The financial cost to the victim is more than $1,000 per incident of identity theft, in addition to countless hours of letter writing and phone calls. The cost to business is more than $10,000 per incident.
- Malware programs steal personal data online. These programs climbed to more than 1.2 million this year from 135,000 in 2007.
- 90 percent of malware programs are designed to grab personal information like SSNs and credit cared numbers from online sites that are not protected with spyware.
- Consumers expose themselves to malware by downloading attachments or clicking links in emails.
- Theives find information by looking through the trash, filling out postal change of address forms in the victims name and hacking into online records.
- After obtaining personal information, a theif may commit new account fraud, which occurs when an identity thief uses a victim’s name and SSN to apply for new credit.