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In the 'good old days', pre computer, if a mistake was made in an account or the government inadvertently listed you as not paying your tax or some other government bill, it was much easier to correct. I am not saying it was easy, far from it, but it was magnitudes easier than it is today. You never heard of things like 'identity theft'. Maybe that was because there were no credit cards for one thing. Bank accounts weren't electronic and didn't enable you to go online and make changes. You couldn't purchase items online or take out loans that way. Everything was a lot more personal. Even buying insurance was personal because the agent would come around to your house every month to collect the payment. Can you imagine that happening now? Things were so different. I am talking about the period of time right after World War II and before. Even the mail was delivered 3 times per day. I don't know why because we hardly had any, but I think it was to keep employment high. There were some scams going on but nothing like the scams that come over the internet.I get about one scam a week from Nigeria asking me to assist in getting millions of dollar transferred and I am offered 1/3 rd for my services. The email always states that my name was given to the scammer as an honest person that can be trusted.

But what happens today when your name is put on some list somewhere, a list that has an adverse effect on your credit, and you don't even know about it until you apply for credit? This has happened to me already. I received a credit report and to my horror there was the name of someone in Texas, I live on the east coast, that had declared bankruptcy. What makes this story so bizarre is that the name was completely different from mine as was the address of this stranger, yet I was charged with his deeds. It took me six month to straighten out this obvious error. I had to write to every major credit reporting agency and believe me, they just took their time making the changes. I bet that they weren't so slow when they listed the Texan on my credit report. Computers are a wonderful thing but they have their down side. Every company and government agency wants to have their own database and many of them are not too concerned if there is an error in the info. There are companies that sell these databases to other companies and people. The more databases the more vulnerable you are. The computer network is like a system of roots from weeds and spreads throughout the internet carrying your info with it. Everyday we hear about databases being stolen and worse yet, what about the ones that are copied and we don't know about it?

The other day an amendment was suggested to allow bankruptcy. for those victims of identity theft. It wasn't even considered by congress, the representatives of the people. I saw some figures that suggest that there are about 1 million people that were the victims of identity theft but I don't really know how accurate these figures are. One thing I know is that any identity theft is too much and it gets easier every year as more of our data is spread around. How is identity theft accomplished? Non computer identity theft can be accomplished as easily as getting info from your garbage. Burglary can also have the side effect of identity theft. But what we are really talking about here is electronic identity theft. One way this is accomplished, is by sending out trojan like programs that get on our computer and record all our keystrokes and send them back to the program's sender. This method can also be used to obtain data directly from our hard drives. But this is only one method. As I said before, there are many databases out there that have our information in them. Any employee of a company with such a database is a potential threat to our identity. Even without the employee danger, there is a danger that the data will be broken into by outside hackers. Remember, the degree of protection of this data varies from place to place.

Here are a couple of recent cases of identity theft where people were caught:

In California, a man pleaded guilty to obtaining private bank account information about an insurance company's policyholders and used that info to deposit counterfeit checks in the amount of almost $800,000 in his bank account. He was sentenced to only 27 months in jail. It probably took the people that were the victims longer than that to straighten out their lives.

In Florida a defendant had obtained names, addresses and social security numbers from the internet and used them to apply for loans, again over the internet.

This one is a classic. A woman in Florida pleaded guilty to charges that she obtained a driver's license in the name of a person who's identity she had stolen. She then went to the person's bank and used the license to withdraw the money from their bank account. Now she obtained credit cards from stores in the victim's name and ran up large bills. This must have been fun to try and straighten out.

So what is the real problem here and why is identity theft spreading? I think there is a very simple answer. All these companies should not be allowed to have databases with everyone's name and addresses in them. Maybe less databases that are administered by some authority is the answer. The second thing is that there should be some severe penalty to a company that allows a database to be stolen. Unfortunately the Federal Government doesn't set much of a standard. There seems to be many cases where laptops were stolen from them that contain critical information.

On May 30, 2004, the DEA lost a laptop with the names of 100 informants. I wouldn't want to be one of them! The Tampa Tribune of August 9, 2002 ran a story where an expert stated "The government's record of protecting its thousands of computers from theft and intrusion is confused, weak and not likely to improve anytime soon." I don't know how many lap tops have been lost by the American Government but in 2002 the British Government had lost 594 laptops and a total of 1354 computers. These figures don't exactly instill confidence that our data will be protected, do they? One bank, which will remain nameless, lost the records of over 2,000,000 customers this year. That is TWO MILLION. Any one of us could be effected by this.

It is also unfortunate that while some of the perpetrators of these schemes receive light sentences, the victims suffer much more than they do and Congress has no sympathy in the form of relief, even though the government might be directly responsible for losing the data or allowing it to be copied.

The laws must be changed regarding this type of crime. Criminals must be made to fear the consequences of being caught and companies must fear the penalties for being careless with their info. Treaties must be ratified that will allow countries to deal with international identity thieves. While we do have some treaties that allow for this, there are many places in the world where we don't.