Is anyone aware of synthetic ID theft?

[Anonymous]

Interesting  article on Bankrate.com today about synthetic ID theft.   Kinda scary, someone could lift

your ID and our credit report wouldn't know the difference..

Anybody know of  free-ish sort of way to monitor account so you don't pay through the nose to keep an idea on credit history.

[Anonymous]

Crazy.  Now they steal your SSN but make up a new name, address, etc.  Good luck keeping ahead of the game on this one.

You can get an extra set of free annual credit reports if you live in Maine, Maryland, Mass., New Jersey or Vermont, so you could get 6 reports total per 12 months -- you could check for free every other month.  I know that won't satisfy the credit monitoring junkies who need their daily fix! Check

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20010223c.asp#credit for other states where additional reports are available at a reduced rate. 

Monitoring CRs won't address the synthetic ID theft problem, though...

Message Edited by masdeocho on 05-16-2007 06:00 PM

[Anonymous]

You can pull once every 12 months at http://www.annualcreditreport.com

At six month intervals, you could sign up for TC for a month then cancel. $11.21 a year.

If you subscribed to TC at three month intervals in between your annual, that's $33.63 a year.

About as close to free as you'll get and still see all three CRAs.

[smallfry]

Interesting article Todd.

[Anonymous]

Yeah and what happens if they tap into your social security benefits?

[Anonymous]

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toddj1965 wrote:

Yeah and what happens if they tap into your social security benefits?

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You get a SS statement every year; perhaps it would show there if someone was claiming.

[smallfry]

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/13333510/detail.html

[Tuscani]

Scary stuff. Although shady practices from the "inside" are nothing new. I read a story last year on a CRA employee who was accepting payments for deleting derogs.

[Anonymous]

The Social Security Admin does mail out annual statements but I think it has happened where people have tapped into others SSN benefits. I'd imagine the Soc Sec Admin would still give us our benefits if someone steals our identity..but it is still scary.

I think the fact that Synthetic ID theft is growing so quickly argues that the whole credit reporting and tracking proceedure could become unmanagable.  Reform is necessary.

[Anonymous]

Is it possible that because of synthetic ID theft..perhaps our credit score is negatively affected by someone creating a  parallell ID using some of our info?

Also on another post someone said Citibank doesn't report % of limit used...just our total limit..izzat  true?