In 1997, Arizona’s Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) became the first government entity in the nation to post public records online. The decision to post a blizzard of records, including land purchases, election information, tax information, divorce cases and much more, garnered praise from the local press and won Maricopa a place in the Smithsonian’s prestigious National IT Innovation Collection. But it has come back to bite the county in a most unpleasant way: Maricopa now claims the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and local IT officials say the two statistics are inextricably linked.

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Authorities are discovering that more and more desperate users of the drug are turning to identity theft to pay for their habit, creating a criminal nexus costing Americans millions of dollars.

The trend is sweeping the West and spreading to other parts of the country, with one hub of activity in the garages and trailer parks of Riverside and San Bernardino counties on the fringe of suburban Los Angeles.

The region was the site of a third of California’s nearly 500 meth lab busts in 2004 and is home to the second-highest number of identity theft victims in the nation.

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A new study suggests consumers whose credit cards are lost or stolen or whose personal information is accidentally compromised face little risk of becoming victims of identity theft.

The analysis, released late yesterday, also found that even in the most dangerous data breaches — where thieves access Social Security numbers and other sensitive information on consumers they have deliberately targeted — only about 1 in 1,000 victims had their identities stolen.

ID Analytics, the San Diego-based fraud-detection company that performed the analysis, said it looked at four recent data breaches involving a total of 500,000 consumers. It declined to provide the names of the companies involved in the breaches, but Mike Cook, a co-founder of ID Analytics, said one of them was a top five U.S. bank.
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CHICAGO (Reuters) – A new study suggests consumers whose credit cards are lost or stolen or whose personal information is accidentally compromised face little risk of becoming victims of identity theft.

The analysis, released late on Wednesday, also found that even in the most dangerous data breaches — where thieves access social security numbers and other sensitive information on consumers they have deliberately targeted — only about 1 in 1,000 victims had their identities stolen.

ID Analytics, the San Diego, California-based fraud detection company that performed the analysis, said it looked at four recent data breaches involving a total of 500,000 consumers. It declined to provide the names of the companies involved in the breaches, but Mike Cook, ID Analytics co-founder, said one of them was a top five U.S. bank.

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Authorities say there’s another brand of identity theft that’s getting their attention – kids whose credit ratings are ruined after parents put bills in their names. Officials say even though the debt is still within the same family, it’s still a form of identity theft and it’s still a crime. Kids may not even know it happened until years later when their first credit applications are turned down because of bad credit.

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