FTC Planning to Conduct a Wide-Range Study on Identity Theft Victims

marcocasassamont — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:36:00 GMT

As highlighted in this recent article (called “FTC recruiting identity theft victims”), FTC is planning to conduct a wide-range study on identity theft victims: “In an effort to buttress its enforcement and better understand the scourge that is identity theft, the Federal Trade Commission said today its plans to conduct a wide-ranging study of victims of the crime.The FTC is looking for people harmed by the crime and said the survey will examine the remedies available to victims under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACT Act). Among other things, the FACT Act gave consumers the right to place fraud alerts on their credit files if they are, or suspect they may become, victims of identity theft; block information on their credit reports that resulted from identity theft; and obtain copies of their credit reports free of charge.” More details are in the article mentioned above, including the URL of the FTC survey site (NOTE: at the moment of writing I tried to connect to this site but it does not work …).

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Identity Thefts, The US FACT Act and Red Flag rules …

marcocasassamont — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:01:00 GMT

How may of you were aware of the fact that US Financial institutions face a mandatory deadline of November 1, 2008 to comply with 3 new US Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT Act) regulations referred to as the Red Flag rules?

As explained (in a nutshell) in this wikipedia page, these are 3 new regulations:

“One that requires financial institutions or creditors to develop and implement an Identity Theft Prevention Program in connection with both new and existing accounts. The Program must include reasonable policies and procedures for detecting, preventing, and mitigating identity theft;
Another that requires users of consumer reports to respond to Notices of Address Discrepancies that they receive;
A third that places special requirements on issuers of debit or credit cards to assess the validity of a change of address if they receive notification of a change of address for a consumer’s debit or credit card account and, within a short period of time afterward they receive a request for an additional or replacement card for the same account.”

I wonder how much these new measures will be effective in mitigating the risks of identity thefts …

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Research on Security and Identity Management (by Marco Casassa Mont) : identity thefts

FTC Planning to Conduct a Wide-Range Study on Identity Theft Victims

Identity Thefts, The US FACT Act and Red Flag rules …