Two Accused Of Stealing Credit Information To Buy Goods
from the I-sense-a-pattern dept
In all the stories about identity theft, there's always the section where people tell you what to do to protect yourself. However, in all of the big identity theft arrests, it always seems to turn out that the stealing is being done by someone on the inside - with direct access to credit reports. In those cases, there's really nothing you can do to protect yourself. That seems to be exactly what was happening in the latest arrest of scammers accused of identity theft. One of the two worked at a mortgage broker as an admin assistant and used the computer system there to order up almost 4,000 credit reports of customers, that were later used to create fake identities in order to buy things. It took people nearly 4,000 unauthorized accesses of the database before someone took notice? You would think, with such information, that there would be more stringent control mechanisms in place.
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Don't credit reports cost money?
When the police finally caught up to him and arrested him (they arrested me at the same time because I was standing too close to him at the time thus meaning I must be an accomplice, I was later let go) I remember one of the cops telling my brother that he would have to teach them how to do that because they couldn't afford to run all the credit reports they used to track people down.
Even if it's only $1 per report (probably much, much more), wouldn't the mortgage company notice an additional $4000 in report fees? Wouldn't their credit report provider get suspicious and ask how come their utilization has sky-rocketed?
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