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Identity Theft: Unlawfully Acquiring Another’s Means of Identification

The term identity theft first appeared in the American language around 1996 and, its earliest reference pertains to a lobby of the US Federal Trade Commission that regulates the criminal abuse of a consumer’s “means of identification”. Consumers were more and more concerned with financial crimes that exploited their credit worthiness and, were used to commit loan fraud, mortgage fraud, lines-of-credit fraud and much more. A common thread that ran in most of these identity theft crimes was that lenders as well as vendors relied on shared use of highly centralized national credit-rating services and, combined with centralization of financial services, along with the emerging national retail outlets that did not require personally knowing their customers, helped criminals in devising new methods of defrauding consumers.

Check Kiting, Fraudulently Using Credit Cards and, More

There are other identity theft crimes such as check kiting, running amok with personal savings accounts as well as theft and fraudulently using credit cards. The term identity theft morphed it to include a greater range of identification based crimes. What was once dead beat dads avoiding their financial obligations rapidly changed its face to include money laundering, trafficking in human beings and also manipulating stock markets and, even found its way into terrorism? Identity theft generates a certain amount of confusion when trying to reconcile the term with a crime. Though it is not possible to steal a person’s identity in a pure linguistic sense, it is possible to steal their means of identification as well as their identifying documents. Identity theft may also be thought of as being a term to describe exploitation of means of identification for unlawful purposes.

With technology readily available for producing forged identification documents, the onset of identity theft related crimes has grown and, criminals use stolen identification to clone others and conceal their true identity from authorities. Crimes such as illegal immigration, terrorism as well as espionage are areas where identity theft plays an important role and, it may also be used for blackmail. Cases of identity theft that involve cloning another person can be used to attack payment systems such as getting hold of medical treatment and, unlike credit-dependent financial crimes, these crimes do not readily reveal themselves and, may continue for indeterminate amounts of time, escaping detection all the time.

Identity theft is made possible by unlawfully acquiring legally attributed personal identification and, in the case of consumers, it can be attributed to personal naivety when gullible people provide their personal information to thieves or are careless with such information. The need to guard zealously one’s personal information cannot be stressed enough and, one will pay the penalty if one is lax in this matter.