Issue Date: January 19, 2003
Protect yourself
Identity theft has reached epidemic proportions. I learned that when my brother's identity was stolen; the thief ran up $10,000 in credit card debt in his name. Even the identities of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg have been stolen. No wonder the Social Security Administration calls it the hottest white-collar crime around.
No one is immune from identity theft. Even Oprah Winfrey was a victim.
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Now a Web site has emerged to help combat this fraud, which costs consumers an estimated $2 billion a year. Cardcops.com checks to see whether a given credit card number is at risk of being stolen. The Malibu, Calif.-based site's wide-reaching crawler identifies card numbers that pass through suspicious public domains where online thieves operate. The site flags them, then stores them in a database of about 100,000 potentially compromised numbers. "You would be surprised how much damage someone can do just with your credit card number," says Cardcops' chief executive officer, Dan Clements.
After seeing a few odd charges on her monthly statement, Deanna Foster of Portola Valley, Calif., visited the site. She clicked on the "Check Your Credit Card" link and typed her 16-digit account number into the database. The number popped up, indicating it likely was compromised. Foster immediately called her credit card company and discovered $1,500 in illegal charges. "Cardcops made the difference in me doing something about it immediately or waiting," she says. "Waiting could have meant much more money and much more hassle."
Although cases like Foster's are encouraging, the site cannot track every card online, nor can it detect identity theft outside of credit cards, where much of that type of crime exists. For prevention, Cardcops.com is a good start, but it's only a start.
-- David Lipschultz
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