Kroll Fraud Solutions Blog – A Dialogue on Data Security

The holidays are all about tradition – and one of our favorite traditions at Kroll is our yearly offering of tips and techniques that any individual concerned about identity theft can use to keep their sensitive personal identifiers safe during the holiday season. For better or worse, this time of year presents a prime opportunity for thieves.

Kroll’s Licensed Investigators, who have collectively worked with thousands of consumers to keep their identities safe, compiled the following list of tips to help you keep your sensitive information safe.

Practice safe shopping in stores

In the past couple of days, there’s been a story out in the media about a handful of shopping malls testing a technology that reads unique serial numbers from mall visitors’ cell phones and tracks their movements. Want to know how many visitors shop in Store A and then go to Store B? Or how many people who have lunch in the food court aren’t shopping anywhere else in the mall? The system can tell you that, too.

At this time of year, travel-related identity theft gets a lot of attention, and with good reason. The increase in travelers means more opportunity for thieves, who know to step up their activities during the summer months – such as the recent increase in hotel pretexting that the Better Business Bureau has warned of that’s also making headlines. And as the line blurs between work and personal life, many of us carry our jobs with us even when traveling for pleasure, bringing along laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices to stay connected to what’s happening at the office. These travelers bear a double burden – protecting their own sensitive information as well as that of their company.

On July 12, the Federal Trade Commission and the Office for Victims of Crime (DOJ Office of Justice Programs) will hold a one-day forum entitled Stolen Futures: A Forum on Child ID Theft. This forum will explore child identity theft from all different aspects, including identity theft within foster care situations and within families.

So what does this have to do with businesses? Isn’t this largely a consumer issue? The FTC says no: according to the Bureau of Consumer Protection Business Center blog, “leaders in the business community play an important role in raising awareness about this issue … any form of identity theft – but especially ID theft involving kids – can have serious economic consequences to companies. Because children can’t legally enter into contracts or incur debt, businesses often wind up taking the loss.”

Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, recently announced plans to begin offering more consumer data on its reports, in the form of rental histories. This comes after Experian’s acquisition of RentBureau, a company that collects consumer rental history. The plan, according to Experian, is to combine rental payment data as recorded by RentBureau with the credit data already collected by Experian, in order to provide a more “complete” picture of the consumer’s credit history and, quite possibly, help renters that pay on time boost their credit scores.