Protecting your identity

Painesville officer shares tips

The holiday shopping season relies heavily on credit and debit card transactions.

While it may be your name on your bank card, thanks to identity theft, someone else may be along for the ride.

“The majority of fraud cases we’ve dealt with involved Social Security numbers or other identify information being used against the victim, or having accounts opened in the victim’s name,” said Det. Jason Hughes of the Painesville Police Department.

“This type of activity is always there but there is a slight increase over the holidays given the sheer amount of transactions. This hides a

lot of the fraudulence because there is just so much going on that people lose track with stuff lost in the shuffle.”

Hughes highlights the dangers of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram where people often willingly provide ample amounts of their personal information.

“When a person is looking to do something fraudulent with someone’s information they will go through social engineering and do research,” he said.

“In this day and age with the Internet, that’s the thing that gives people looking to do illegal activity pretty easy access to a lot of information.

“People post where they’re at and what they’re doing on a regular basis, let alone all the general information like where they work at, what they do, where they live, where they visit,” he added. “That links to all their friends too.”

Hughes described how utilities, cable or Internet services can get opened by a third party under someone else’s name. When this occurs, it often takes bill collectors seeking payment for the victim to realize their identity has been compromised.

“That’s a fair ways down the road at that point,” Hughes said. “The perpetrator is quite a ways away from it at that point. So those become difficult to investigate but there’s usually an electronic path somewhere that we can try to go after.

“We tell people to look out for unauthorized bank activity,” he added. “You have to pay very close attention to your bank statement and utility bills. Running credit checks to see if any accounts have been used in your name is also a good option.”

Hughes also warns against the act of “skimming” where a criminal will attach a credit card reader atop a preexisting ATM which then feeds that credit card’s information back to the criminal.

“It’s probably the easiest way for them to get card information,” he explains.

“There’s many different forms of it. The technology in the card gets better, but as that gets better so too does the technology on the fraud side.”

To safeguard against skimming, Hughes advises, “Paying attention to the surroundings. If something doesn’t look right, or if something is hanging off the ATM, go inside and alert the bank tellers. The standalone ATMs not attached to banks are probably the most susceptible to this type of activity.”