Title: CONCEPTS

Concepts

Within the United States, the term identity theft is generally used to discuss identity-related crime. Unlike many, if not most, other countries the United States actually has a legal definition of identity theft. According to the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, which Congress passed in 1998, identity theft occurs when someone “knowingly transfers or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of Federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided a more concrete definition of identity fraud in 1998. According to GAO, identity fraud “…refers to the illegal use of personal identifying information—such as name, address, Social Security number (SSN), and date of birth—to commit financial fraud. Identity fraud can encompass a host of crimes, ranging from the unauthorized use of a credit card to a comprehensive takeover of another person’s identity and financial accounts.” Interestingly enough is how in the early years, GAO, among others, used the term identity fraud rather than identity theft. It remains unclear what sort of influence led to the current dominant use of the term identity theft, although perhaps the focus of the debate explains the use of terminology. The main focus of the debate is on financial cases of identity theft, in particular those where perpetrators abuse the identity of an existing person rather than a false identity. Certain incidents and categories of identity-related crime do not, as a result, receive the necessary attention. Synthetic identity fraud, for example, as ID Analytics referred to it, is largely ignored. Synthetic identity fraud is identity-related crime through the misuse of a fabricated identity. Statistics on this type of identity-related crime indicate a worrisome trend which will be discussed in the section on prevalence.

Other elements of identity theft which, according to certain individuals, do not receive equal attention are medical and criminal identity theft. Both can lead to awful consequences for victims. Medical identity theft is perhaps the newest type of identity theft recognized within the United States. According to Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum, “[m]edical identity theft occurs when someone uses a person’s name and sometimes other parts of their identity – such as insurance information – without the person’s knowledge or consent to obtain medical services or goods, or uses the person’s identity information to make false claims for medical services or goods.” Furthermore, medical identity theft often leads to crucial errors or fictituous information in existing medical records of victims. The World Privacy Forum convincingly claims that medical identity theft “…is the least studied and most poorly documented of the cluster of identity theft crimes.”

With criminal identity theft, the perpetrator commits a (serious) crime and provides a ‘stolen’ identity to escape prosecution. When individuals become victims of criminal identity theft they may, for example, be initially stopped for a minor traffic violation, but upon checking their records the law enforcement officer finds a warrant out of their arrest for a serious crime like murder. The identity theft victim is then wrongfully arrested and subsequently locked up in prison.  

These types of identity theft largely remain in the background, as the debate continues to be about the presence and the potential elimination of financial identity theft within contemporary society. The problem with this exclusive focus on financial identity theft is to perhaps ignore patterns of vulnerabilities within the infrastructure which, when unraveled, could help to reduce all types of identity theft. All incidents of identity theft require perpetators to obtain certain ‘tools’ and to use them in some way. If the focus were to be broadened perhaps more facilitating factors could be discovered.