Recently in Identity Theft in Action Category

Stanford University sent notification to tens of thousands of past and current employees that their personal information and identity is at risk because of a single stolen laptop that contained their personal information. The laptop was not encrypted.

A Stanford spokesman said that the stolen laptop contained personal information, including birth dates, social security numbers, and home addresses of people hired by the university before September 28th, 2007. According to the university this could be as many as 72,000 individuals.

Stanford has become the latest in a series of organizations to suffer a public relations nightmare - from Wells Fargo Bank to the US Department of Veterans Affairs – because of  a security breaches from a single stolen laptop. The sad fact here is that as the trustee of the personal information given to it, Stanford University has failed tens of thousands of people and put their financial identity at risk of being abused.

Yahoo has filed suit against a group of phishers. Yahoo alleges that the scammers tried to trick Yahoo subscribers into thinking that they had won a prize from Yahoo in an effort to steal their passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information.

According to the Associated Press, Yahoo filed the lawsuit on May 16 in U.S. District Court in New York City under federal trademark law, federal anti-spam law and other state laws. In the lawsuit the company states that the defendants pretended to be Yahoo representatives, sending out e-mails claiming recipients had won prizes ranging from a few thousand to a million dollars and instructed them to click on a link or forward personal information to a “Yahoo lottery coordinator” to get their prize.

Some recipients were instructed to contact another party to arrange for the prize payment, Yahoo said in the filing, and this other party would charge them “hundreds of dollars in various processing and mailing charges in order to complete the payment process.”

Such “phishing” scams are meant to trick consumers into sharing financial information.

A new study by the Economic Crime Institute work group, based at Utica College, has found that a surprising number of identity thieves are women.

The researchers have been given access to Secret Service case files on identity theft spanning from 2000 to 2006. The group’s findings provide the first-ever look at the criminals and victims in major identity theft cases.

Arapahoe County Sheriff's investigators say the woman entered the Wells Fargo near Dry Creek and Yosemite at 10:40 a.m. on August 21.

They say she tried to get a $5,000 cash advance using a stolen credit card.

Source: 9News.com