Revenge website targets credit score

Foxnews.com reports yesterday that an illegal website offered to ruin the credit score of anyone for a small fee, and even to arrange to have them suspected of bank fraud.

Making numerous credit applications with the victim's SSN and DOB and invented addresses and names will cause the person's credit to be put on hold, claims the website.

The UK-centric web-based service also offered to create false bank documents, identity cards, automobile registry papers, paychecks and tax forms.

Such fraudulent services are doubtless short-lived when discovered by the public and law enforcement agencies, but this report is illustrative of the types of financial and bureaucratic vulnerability most people have in modern society. You can imagine the potential ramifications in your life if your credit cards, credit line and bank account were suspended, even if only temporarily, and the trouble and costs to have the situation resolved.

Let this threat serve as a another reminder to shred documents, jealously guard your financial privacy and personal information, check your credit report, and avoid situations that could compromise personal data.

Check your assets every year

The San Francisco Chronicle on "unclaimed assets" seized under California state law, unbeknownst to its owners:

Years ago, Carla Ruff stored her grandmother's jewelry and a file of personal documents in a safe-deposit box at her bank in San Francisco's Noe Valley, thinking they would always be there when she wanted them.

Not so. Without giving her notice or acting on evidence that she'd forgotten about her cache, the bank's staff, under the auspice of the state, determined the contents of her box to be unclaimed property.

In July 1997, bank records show, the pearl necklace and diamond-encrusted pin, real estate and insurance documents as well as her birth certificate were all removed. The paperwork was shredded and thrown away. Her jewelry was auctioned off on eBay -- for a fraction of its $80,000 value.

Ruff said she didn't know what had happened until January 2006, when an illness in the family sent her to the Bank of America branch looking for the deed to her house. Weeks later, the bank manager told Ruff that her property had been seized by the state under a law that requires the government to take control of lost or abandoned assets.

Elaborate privacy arrangements can discourage us from checking up on our assets as frequently as we should. Sometimes it's difficult to verify financial arrangements while maintaining strict privacy procedures such as mail drops, or depositing cash into accounts in person in lieu of automated transfers (to avoid creating a paper trail linking the accounts together through the transaction).

Nonetheless, it behooves anyone with assets held by an outside institution or with agreements with business associates to check their status occasionally. It's something we should plan for when setting up privacy arrangements:

• U.S. Post Office box fees can usually only be paid a year in advance -- a renewal notice should come 30 days before payment is due.
  
• Safe deposit boxes should be visisted at least yearly.
  
• Financial accounts should be checked monthly for evidence of unauthorized access or identity theft.
  
• Many types of insurance contracts must be renewed yearly.
  
• LLC costs may be due after the first three years depending on provider.
  
• Trusts and attorneys should be contacted yearly or more frequently.
  
• Financial accounts with tax implications must be verified at the required tax intervals.
  

Fake Credit Report Sites

If you're an American looking to get one of the free credit reports guaranteed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the site you want is AnnualCreditReport.com. Their phone number is 877-322-8228.

Ignore all other sites or offers unless you're looking for high-pressure inducements for pricey add-on services, or even flat-out fraud. Do you really want to be giving out your vital information, like SSN and DOB, to a potential scammer or some random unscrupulous type who would portray themselves as an official source for data as private as a credit report?

For more information about the reputability of credit report websites, read the FTC report on fake credit report sites.

Comparison of Prepaid Credit Cards

Ryan Barrett at snarfed.org has an updated essay on protecting your privacy with prepaid credit cards and gift cards.

Medical Identity Theft

From the January 8, 2007 issue of Businessweek, an article about medical identity theft and health care databases:

But some privacy advocates fear that the rush toward digital health records could ironically create new nightmares for victims of medical ID theft. Rather than residing in a single doctor's paper files, fraudulent information—such as the erroneous diabetes diagnosis in Lind Weaver's records—could circulate in other medical databases across the country. Given that some medical ID thefts are "inside jobs," wherein rogue clerks sell patient data to fraudsters on the outside, privacy advocates believe that allowing data to flow more freely around a national network could make such thefts even easier. "We can expect [medical ID theft] to grow the more we move toward an electronic health-care system. It's going to be a disaster," says Dr. Deborah Peel, an Austin (Tex.) psychiatrist and founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

...but, as usual, the weakest link is usually a human:

In September, federal authorities arrested a scheduling clerk at the Cleveland Clinic's Weston (Fla.) hospital who allegedly had passed on the personal identification information of more than 1,100 patients to her cousin—who in turn submitted $2.8 million in false claims to Medicare. "Hospitals have done a poor job of implementing security procedures on their computer systems," says one federal investigator. "You'd be astonished how many people have access to your medical records."