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Rise in Number of ID Theft SARs ‘Alarming’: FinCEN Director
By Colby Adams
printThe number of suspicious activity reports filed on potential identity theft increased over 120 percent between 2004 and 2009, the head of the U.S. Treasury Department's financial intelligence unit said Monday. The 123 percent jump coincided with an 89 percent rise in the total number of reports, known as SARs, over the same 5-year period, said James Freis, the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) during the American Bankers Association's anti-money laundering compliance conference in Washington, D.C. "It is clear that the reports of identity theft have been rising over the years at an alarming rate," said Freis,...
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U.S. lawmakers proposed legislation Wednesday to combat the pilfering of tax refunds, now the most common type of identity theft-related fraud in the country.
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Reports of check fraud tied to identity theft rose in 2009 even as instances of related loan and credit fraud fell, according to a study released Friday by the Identity Theft Resource Center.
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The Federal Trade Commission Wednesday again pushed back the enforcement deadline of a controversial rule requiring financial institutions and "creditors" to take steps to prevent identity theft-related data breaches.
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A report issued by San Diego, Calif.-based ID Analytics, which makes ID theft software, looked at about a dozen data breaches involving Social Security numbers and other identifying information.
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Final federal banking regulations for monitoring identity theft moved forward on Monday as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., one of six federal banking agencies considering the measures, approved them.
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The request follows an April 23 government report on ID theft that recommended establishing national data protection standards for the private sector and reducing the use of Social Security numbers among government agencies.
Financial institutions, in attempting to minimize data breaches, often focus their budgets on systems meant to foil sophisticated hackers rather than guard against employee mistakes, such as losing a mobile device, and other vulnerabilities that cause most breaches.
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Seeking to combat identity theft, federal and state lawmakers have advanced a number of initiatives that would restrict how banks and other companies use Social Security numbers to identify consumers.