SBP Article on identity theft

damien

http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=MORE%20COMPUTER%20NEWS-qqqm=nav-qqqid=7511-qqqx=1.asp

Some countries have strong privacy laws protecting our personal information, but many do not. Some companies have strong privacy standards, but many don't.

In the Indian city of Pune, banking giant Citigroup has outsourced some of its call centre operations to a company called Mphasis BPO. In December of last year, three employees of Mphasis BPO stole the account details and Pin numbers of four Citibank customers. The employees then quit their jobs. Shortly afterwards, these three people, with the help of others, withdrew over $300,000 from the Citibank customers' accounts. The Citibank customers affected were all New York-based.

Recently in Britain, a reporter for the Sun newspaper, Oliver Harvey, was able to buy personal information on 1,000 account holders of Barclays, the Woolwich, HSBC and Lloyds TSB from a call centre agent in India. He paid a total of $5,000 (€4,100) for account holders' addresses, secret passwords, credit card details, passports and driving license information. He even received the expiry date of some cards as well as the three-digit security codes.

Luckily for us in Ireland, and indeed for most of the European Union, identity theft is not as much of a problem. Britain is a mild exception to the rule, as approximately 0.17 per cent of its population is a victim of account hijacking, new account fraud and various other types of identity fraud. In the US, this figure is approximately 3.4 per cent.

Why is identity theft such a big problem in the US, compared with the European Union? In the US, Social Security Numbers (SSNs) are used as a primary identifier. This is the key piece of information that an identity thief needs.

In Europe, such national ID numbers appear a lot less than SSNs do in the USA.

Europe's privacy laws are set out in the European Union directives on privacy.

Personal information is available only to the people who need to access it to fulfill their job function. There are strict rules regarding transfer of data to third parties and to regions outside the EU. Information is kept private; businesses cannot sell or share personal or financial information.

This is not the case in the US, where credit reporting is much more controlled. In Europe, financial institutions share credit information with each other, but not with outsiders. However, in the US, almost any business can access credit information on any consumer instantly.

maidhc

The differences between the SSN and the Irish PPS Number are becoming less with every year.

The bodies entitled to use the PPS have increased with every Social Welfare Act (bar the 2001 one). The number of specified bodies now entitled to use the PPSN is quite astounding and far more are entitled to request it for the purposes of a transaction with a specified body (e.g. Landlords, Employers, etc.)

See http://welfare.ie/topics/ppsn/index.html and in particular the register of users of the PPSN: http://welfare.ie/topics/ppsn/rou.html

Speaking to a guy from the DSFA recently he said the problem of ID theft would be solved by the digital credential in the new SAFE (Secure Authentication Framework Environment) card. :S