How2Day: Agencies That Deal With Identity Theft

Modern conveniences have paved the way for cases of identity theft. Credit cards (shallow DoF) image by Andrejs Pidjass from Fotolia.com
Identity theft -- or, as the US Postal Inspection Service puts it, "how bad people get good credit" -- claimed more than 9.9 million American victims in 2009, at a cost of roughly $5 billion. In some areas, cooperative efforts are under way to help victims and educate the public in what Bay Area Identity Theft Council director Neal O'Farrell called "a neighborhood watch for the 21st century." Such organizations work with law enforcement, consumer agencies and the business community to train counselors to help people clean up the mess that identity theft can make of their lives.

The U.S Department of Justice (D.O.J.) begins its discussion of this "new" crime with a vintage quote from Shakespeare's Othello: "But he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed." The D.O.J. prosecutes identity theft and fraud under a variety of federal statutes: the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998, which punishes offenders with a maximum term of 15 years' imprisonment, a fine and criminal forfeiture of any personal property used in the crime, and other statutes against ID fraud, credit card fraud, computer fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud and/or financial institution fraud, all federal felonies that can carry penalties as high as 30 years.

The U.S. Secret Service is tasked with "maintaining the integrity of the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems," according to its website, and works hard to prevent and respond to electronic and computer-related crime. The agency "records criminal complaints, assists victims in contacting other relevant investigative and consumer protection agencies and works with other federal, state and local law enforcement and reporting agencies to identify perpetrators." The Patriot Act of 2001 mandated the Secret Service to establish Electronic Crimes Task Forces nationwide, uniting law enforcement with prosecutors, private industry and academia to prevent, detect, mitigate and agressively investigate electronic thuggery.

"For the FBI, identity theft is nothing new," the agency's website declares. "We've been dealing with criminals faking IDs for decades, from check forgers to fugitives on the run." Using both conventional and cyber crimefighting resources and intelligence networks, the FBI works to identify and root out crime groups and all sorts of ID theft perpetrators. Many larger cities have dedicated FBI task forces, and they collaborate with local and regional law enforcers as well as businesses, governments and educators on prevention and investigation.

If the U.S. mail is involved in your identity theft case in any way, the Postal Inspection Service wants to know about it. The USPIS offers online reporting of identity theft so it can add its investigative muscle to that of the other agencies involved, and has produced an identity theft-awareness video for consumer groups, financial institutions, and police departments to share with the public.

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