Identity crisis in the information age.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Includes related articles

Cyberspace has made it too easy for thieves to steal and abuse people's identity. Legislators are trying to stay ahead of the growing crime.

William E. Porter knew there was something wrong when he received an invoice from the local newspaper in Las Cruces, N.M., billing him for a recent ad he ran for apples from his orchard.

"It didn't make sense," says Porter, who just retired after serving eight years in the state's House of Representatives. "I knew my wife had already sent the paper a check, so I couldn't figure it out."

Things were made even more mysterious when the Porters received a notice from their local bank telling them that a check they had written for $700 was an overdraft. The check bore the same identifying numbers as the one for $69 that Mrs. Porter had sent to the paper.

"Then we put things together and soon found out we were the victims of what people now call 'identity fraud,'" says Porter "Someone had stolen the check out of our front yard mailbox, washed the figures to change them from $69 to $700, and then cashed it."

But even worse, someone had to take on the name of Mrs. Porter to get the check cashed. That thought chilled Representative Porter and his wife.

All things considered, the Porters got off relatively easy. Increasingly today, as much as $50,000 in debt can be charged against a victim's credit before they discover that someone has obtained some piece of simple information about them - their name, their Social Security or driver's license number - and is using it to get credit and make purchases.

From there begins an unbelievable nightmare of obliterated credit ratings, bounced checks and lost homes. Some victims end up with criminal records because the thief has committed other crimes while using their names and identities. It's a theft like no other - someone out there steals your name, your identity and does bad things to you as you.

An unwilling expert is Jessica Grant of Sun Prairie, Wis., whose plight inspired lawmakers to craft one of the nation's toughest identity theft laws. It includes felony sentences of up to two years and fines of up to $5,000 or both.

Grant and her husband didn't know they were victims until they applied to refinance their mortgage. The bank turned them down based on a credit report that showed Jessica Grant had a debt trail of more than $60,000, which included massive credit card expenditures, two car loans and even a $25,000 loan on a mobile home.

Grant had spent none of the $60,000. A woman in Texas had somehow gotten both her name and Social Security number and simply used them to apply for credit and amass the $60,000 damage.

IT TAKES ONLY A SCRAP OF INFORMATION

By getting any bit of private information on another person - whether it's a Social Security or driver's license number, a birth date, a mother's maiden name and even sometimes just an address - a con can apply for a bounty of new credit cards, car and home loans or virtually anything that allows a purchase with credit.

Victims can go months and even years before knowing they've been hit because the perpetrator usually has the bills sent to a separate address. The con spends, the bills stack up, and the victim's credit record starts to resemble a minefield that may take years to clear up.

This isn't a new crime, it's been happening for years, but the Internet made the problem worse. Because millions of people every day put their credit card numbers and other personal information into the 'Net, primarily for purchases, such data are, in effect, floating out there in cyberspace just waiting for a clever criminal to come along and make quick use of them.

"Can you think of anything worse?" asks Georgia...