Stolen data, altered lives

ID, credit card thefts rise in city, state as economy plummets

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Apr 2, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (5 Reader comments)

Portland Police Officer Barbara Glass sorts through a pile of counterfeit checks and other paperwork on the floor in her office at the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct. She wears gloves to keep her fingerprints off the papers.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

In a cluttered office at the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct, officer Barbara Glass points to a pile of papers more than a foot high that is growing by the day.

The papers are requests from Portland banks, asking Glass and partner David Staab, police bureau identity theft investigators, to look into cases of fraud based on identity theft.

The requests come with transaction records and sometimes photographs, and Glass says eventually she and Staab will get to them all. But it could be years. The economy is down, and the bureau’s four full-time identification theft investigators have more work than they can possibly get done, and Glass thinks there’s a connection.

“People are so desperate now, they are more willing to take a risk,” Glass says.

A report released a month ago by the Federal Trade Commission provides hard data to back up what Glass has been seeing on the street.

Identity theft in Oregon was up 15 percent in 2008 from 2007. The Portland metropolitan area saw an 8 percent increase.

More than one in four consumer complaints made to the Federal Trade Commission in 2008 concerned identity theft — using someone’s Social Security number and personal financial information for economic gain. That makes identity theft the top consumer complaint.

Credit card fraud remains the single most common type of identity theft in Oregon, as it has been for years. But the greatest percentage increase in crime involving identity theft comes from a relatively new category — fraud involving government documents and benefits.

In Oregon, the rate of document and benefits fraud rose 125 percent in 2008. Experts expect this new type of fraud to increase in the coming years.

Documents and benefit fraud can take many forms, but all start with the basics of ID theft — a stolen Social Security number.

Social Security numbers obtained from a variety of sources, including Internet hackers, are readily available for $10 each, experts say. And a Social Security number that belongs to someone with good credit can be used to fraudulently file a tax return. The perpetrator merely has to fill out a W-2 form using a bogus employer and the stolen Social Security number, file a tax return and wait for the tax refund to come back, says Mike Prusinski, vice president of public affairs for Lifelock, an Arizona-based identity theft protection company.

Stolen Social Security numbers also allow people without them to get jobs and health benefits, a growing category of fraud, experts say.

Another newly popular scam, according to Chuck Harwood, regional director for the Federal Trade Commission in Seattle, involves getting government benefits such as Social Security with a stolen number.

Regardless of the scam, most victims of identity theft have to deal with trying to repair their credit rating. And that can be nearly impossible, Prusinski says. By the time an identity theft victim knows he or she has become a victim, all the paperwork and institutional assumptions say he or she received their payout, because someone with their identity did.

TRIBUNE PHOTO: L.E. BASKOW • Portland police officers Barbara Glass and Dave Staab, identity theft investigators out of the Police Bureau’s East Precinct, pore over counterfeit checks that are part of a case. Identity theft rose 15 percent in Oregon in 2008.

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