Identity theft is rampant resulting in millions of dollars of damage each year in the United States. Over the last few years, the face of identity theft has changed. Unfortunately, consumers do not realize this change primarily due to the advertising of credit bureaus, some ID theft service companies and news reporting. ID thieves are the one group that understands the changing faces of identity theft. Yet, what can a person do to prevent ID theft when it is misunderstood and changing?
To understand the problem, you must first realize why thieves want your identity. The answer is simple; they want your credit (money), they want to hide their identity, they want certain services, or they desire employment.
Several years ago, the prevalent type of identity theft was “true name” identity theft. This is when a real person’s identifying information is used without modification. The thief actually poses as the victim. In theses cases, continuous credit monitoring and fraud alerts play a role in keeping the consumer aware of their credit file status.
However as with any theft, once the thief realizes you have caught onto them, they change and come after you wearing a different face. A face harder to detect which credit monitoring and fraud alerts do not readily provide you with protection. These include medical identity theft, criminal identity theft and synthetic identity theft which is the fastest growing form.
Medical identity theft is when a thief uses a consumer’s personal identifying information to acquire medical services. This can become a serious health risk since it places erroneous medical information in the consumer’s medical records. Based on HIPPA, erroneous medical records are more difficult to clean up compared to credit records.
Criminal identity theft occurs when certain credentials are presented to law enforcement the results could be criminal record or arrest warrants. The consumer may never know until they are stopped for a driving violation and realize there is an arrest warrant in their name.
Synthetic identity theft is the fastest growing type of ID fraud. You might not find out if someone uses your Social Security number on a credit application. Not even if you checked your credit report.
Thieves literally create new identities by combining real and fake identifying information to establish new accounts with fictional identities.
In synthetic identity theft, a thief uses a real Social Security number and combines it with a name other than the one associated with that number. The combination often doesn't hit the consumer's credit report nor will a fraud alert help.
The occurrences of Synthetic identity theft have surpassed "true-name" identity fraud. In 2005 synthetic identity fraud accounted for 74 percent of the total dollars lost by U.S. businesses to ID fraud and 88 percent of all identity fraud events.
The other problem is that synthetic ID fraud creates fragmented or subfiles at the credit bureaus. The term fragmented or subfile refers to additional credit report information tied to a real consumer's Social Security number, but someone else's name. Because the identifying information contains some data that's already linked to a particular consumer, the fragmented or subfile gets associated with the consumer's main file.
Negative information is entered under a fragmented of subfile that is then linked to, but doesn't actually belong to you. If you have good credit and derogatory information is going into your fragmented or subfile, that could negatively impact your ability to get credit.
Consumers need to realize that their personal identifying information is located in many places other than the credit bureaus; such as, public records databases, DMV databases, data aggregators (like Choicepoint), criminal databases, healthcare databases and more. Month scanning of these national databases for the misuse of a consumer’s name, address, data of birth and social security number will reveal possible identity theft long before it reaches a credit report and a fraud alert on your credit file does nothing.
In June 2007, a man in Arizona with a fraud alert on his credit file became an ID theft victim. Since then, scanning of the national databases has revealed misuse of his personal identifying information in over 30 cases where his social security number was being used under different names and addresses, long before it reached his credit file and remember a fraud alert does nothing in these cases.
IDSafeChoice PLUS from Identity Theft America provides scanning of national databases and a fully managed recovery service by our trained ID Recovery specialist if you become a victim. 
