identity thief
livingfeature
AMANDA BERG
Sgt. Travis Evenson, head of Economic Crime
at the Lethbridge Police Service, spends
his days investigating economic crimes that
include fraud and identity theft complaints from
innocent people, just like me and you. Learn
how you can avoid becoming a victim.
N O O N E WA N T S T O E X P E R I E N C E the sinking feeling that their
identity has been stolen, yet each year the number of incidents of identity theft
continues to rise, and the ways in which information is stolen has become more
sophisticated. Southern Albertans are just as much at risk of being targeted by
criminals intent on stealing identities, but as Sgt. Travis Evenson, head of Economic
Crime at Lethbridge Police Service (LPS) explains, there are strategies residents
can implement every day to help prevent it from happening in the first place.
“The LPS get the phone call that identity theft has been committed after
the damage has already been done,” says Travis. “Identity theft occurs when
someone’s name has been used illegally for someone else’s financial gain to
obtain something like a credit card, loan, or phone contract, or by acquiring an
asset, like a vehicle or home.”
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 25,933 Canadian complaints
of identity fraud and theft totaling over $10 million in losses were reported in
2014. It estimates that those figures represent less than 5 per cent of all victims
of identity fraud and theft, as the majority of incidents go unreported. Some
estimates have put fraud-related crime in Canada somewhere between $15
billion and $30 billion annually.
“A good day can go bad with a call from a collection agency or credit card
company needing to collect on an outstanding debt that the victim doesn’t know
about,” says Travis. “The Economic Crime section gets called in to backtrack the
records and find out when and where [the victim’s] name was stolen.”
The information that criminals are looking for is easy to obtain and very basic.
Full name, date of birth, address, social insurance number, and driver’s licence or
passport number are all entry points to acquire even more useful information,
such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers, PINs, and other passwords.
“Criminals can obtain an abundance of information just by finding a piece of
discarded mail,” states Travis.
More sophisticated techniques of obtaining information are used online as
well, either with criminals targeting individuals by acquiring personal information
through social media, or by hacking into servers and stealing the personal
information of thousands or millions of people at a time.
And criminals don’t discriminate when they search for an identity to steal–
from children to seniors, from immigrants to people who have lived in the same
house their whole lives–thieves prey on anyone at any time. The key is to not
make the information available in the
first place.
“We recommend people use a
shredder for all personal documents
and not dispose of their mail into a
garbage. Even old computer hard
drives can be a vulnerable entry point
for an identity thief, and destroying the
hard drive by drilling a hole through
adds another layer of insurance,” says
Travis.
Another fairly popular method
of gaining personal information,
which Lethbridge residents have
experienced, is telephone or door-todoor identity theft from fraudsters
claiming to be from organizations
such as the Canada Revenue Agency.
“Never provide your personal
information to people who call or
come to your door,”