Prestige credit card services, such as
American Express Centurion, have a
strong interest in the integrity of their data and will assist when credit is affected by identify theft.
No. Fixing one’s credit report after an identity theft is the responsibility of the individual. Last year, the average victim spent $1,156 correcting his credit, including correspondence, time off work, overnight deliveries, legal services, etc. A premium credit card service may be willing to listen to your complaint a little more carefully than a standard company listens to an average customer, but in the end you will have to fix your own credit. Finally, integrity of data is a good thing, but data is only as good as the person who’s controlling it. It is much easier to hack people than it is to hack computers.
Prominent or high-profile people are less likely to be targeted by identity thieves.
I disagree. The more money an individual has, the more money there is to steal. A thief would much rather assume the identity of an affluent individual, from whom the thief can obtain a credit card with a $100,000 limit, than the identity of an average individual whose credit card has only a $5,000 credit limit. Many identity thieves ride through neighborhoods with homes in the $2-million to $10-million range and copy an address right off the mailbox. Then they search the public records to find out who lives at that address. From there, they start the procedure to obtain the victim’s social security number, date of birth, and other information necessary to assume an identity.
The longer retained accounting or financial professionals have been with a family, the more trustworthy they are.
False. In my 30-year career on this side of the law, most of the embezzlements I have studied involve long-term employees. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall ever analyzing an embezzlement in which the employee had just started working for the company.
One way to prevent embezzlement is to enforce mandatory vacation policies for employees, especially those with access to financial assets or records. Every employee must be required to be out of the office and without transaction control for at least one week each year. Large embezzlement schemes often must be maintained daily, and will sometimes be discovered during an employee’s absence. Sophisticated embezzlement schemes are almost always conducted by the long-tenured, implicitly trusted bookkeeper/ controller/chief financial officer.
New security measures taken in the interests of home-land security will also shield individuals from fraud and
identity theft.
Right now our country is at war. With war comes restrictions and inconveniences for all citizens. But with the amount of information that is already out there—especially for people who own property, have loans, own corporations, sit on boards, and so forth—nothing the government does in the name of homeland security will make someone less susceptible to fraud or identity theft.
|
