What is identity fraud?

A criminal steals information about you, fakes your documents and uses them to pretend to be you. They can then:

• take money from your bank accounts
• get credit in your name
• contact you directly to get the information they need to steal even more from you.

You then have a financial and legal mess. You may have debts that you can't prove were not yours. It can take a long time to sort out the damage to your finances and documentation. Investigating identity theft is a lengthy process and corrections to credit files can only be made after these investigations are completed.

How thieves steal your identity

  Thieves use a variety of false or stolen documents, such as your:

• driver's licence
• Medicare card
• passport
• financial cards
• birth certificate.

Some of these they steal, some they forge. Sometimes they will call you pretending to be from your bank, insurance company or other institution to ask you further details.

How common is identity fraud?

• Up to 25% of reported frauds to the Australian Federal Police involve false identities ("Numbers on the Run" - a report by the House of Representatives Standing committee on Economics, Finance, and Public Administration).
• One survey found that 13% of birth certificates to be false ("Numbers on the Run", Westpac and the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages).
• Identity fraud costs more than $4 billion a year in Australia alone (Cooper & Vale, 2004) 

Using Secure Sentinel

You can help protect yourself against identity fraud by upgrading to SecureIdentity

• you receive a copy of your credit file so that you can check for errors
• Whenever any change occurs (which can mean that a thief is trying to use your identity), we send an email update to you. This allows you to prevent the thief from getting credit in your name.
• We will give you a Secure Sentinel label to place on all your cards. This will discourage thieves from using your cards, and can also help you to recover your cards if they're lost.

How to protect yourself against identity fraud

Criminals can only get information about you if you leave a trail of information as you go about your daily life.

If a financial institution contacts you

Financial institutions never ask you to provide information via a link in an email or in response to a phone call or text message. If you receive any of these do not provide any information to them.

If an institution calls you and asks you for security information, get the caller's name and department, and call them back on their main switch number to be sure you are talking to a genuine employee.

Checklist

Use this checklist to make it as difficult as possible for criminals to steal your identity.

The items you can't tick off predict how criminals may one day take your money and use your credit.

• I have a secured mail box that prevents criminals from easily stealing new credit cards and collecting bank account statements and other documents.
• I never allow shop assistants and waiters to take my credit cards out of my sight when completing transactions. (This protects me from a thief scanning my card and copying the information to use online or to create a fake card.)
• I never give my account details or my PIN to anyone if asked in person, on the phone, or by email.
• I never give personal information to telemarketers, door-knocking market researchers, or door-to-door sales people.
• I always check ATMs to make sure that the card reading slot looks normal. (That protects me from tiny devices fitted into the ATM card slot to read my card details.)
• I always cover the keypad on an ATM or EFTPOS machine when entering my PIN. (That protects me from carefully mounted cameras.)
• I always use a security token when doing internet banking. (A security token generates a one-time code that you enter after your ID and password. Criminals must physically steal the security token to access your account via the internet.)
• My computer has the latest protections against online crime such as firewall and protection against spam, viruses, and spyware. (That protects me from the automated attacks of criminals' computer networks that plant software on my own computer to steal my information and monitor my keystrokes.)
• If I receive an email from my bank I never follow links in the email. Instead I go to the bank's own homepage. (That protects me from fake emails).
• I always destroy documents before throwing them away. (That stops thieves picking my information from the garbage.)
• I only carry major identification documents (e.g. passport, birth certificate) when I need them. Otherwise they are stored safely.
• I sign credit and debit cards as soon as they arrive.
• I always check financial statements for unauthorised transactions.
• I use SecureIdentity to monitor my credit report and advise me of any activity. This helps prevent thieves from taking out credit in my name.
• I never use public computers to do internet banking. Public computers can have software to capture my login details without the managers of those computers knowing.
• I never respond to spam email, chain letters, or email that looks like it could be official that arrives unsolicited by me.
• I have my email software set up so that images in emails don't automatically appear. Criminals use images in emails to track which email addresses in their lists are real. Some images, when loaded, link to a website and could automatically download spyware to my computer.

What to do if your identity is stolen

Take the risk of ID Theft test