Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Identity Theft Turns to Child Porn Bust

this is an audio post - click to play

A New Mexico man gets unfairly labeled as a child
pornagrapher after he himself was the victim of
identity theft.


It seems an identity thief stole the man's name
and credit card number which were subsequently
used in the purchase of a website which posted
child porno.

The true victim, the New Mexico man, began noticing
strange charges on his debit card last March but
never reported them to police.

But he was surprised 3 weeks ago to learn a search
warrant being served to him by the Internet Crimes
Against Children unit while a local television
station conducted a "live" broadcast of the raid
on his home.

It gets worse, though, as this New Mexico man
is a humanities teacher - was put on administrative
leave.

Imagine the humiliation before his community, his
co-workers, his wife, and even his 6 year old son.

The good news to this story, however, is the investigation
uncovered the New Mexico man was actually the victim of
identity theft and was not the child pornagrapher.

He's now, according to the source, is back in school
resuming his teaching career of 8 years.

The only clue the New Mexico man could publicly shed on how he
may have contributed to becoming an identity theft victim was
if some retail sales clerk may have written his account
number
down when he passed his debit card over during a
purchase transaction.

Want to avoid becoming this type of double victim?

Our tip for today, is avoid using your ATM card as a credit card.
Secondly, since identity thieves don't always utilize your stolen
information immediately, having automatic credit monitoring with
exception alerts is highly recommended to catch suspicious
transactions when they occur.

Finally, check your criminal and public records profiles
for any instances where an identity thief has used your name.

Special endnote:

Please subscribe anonymously for twice weekly automatic free
tips delivered automatically to your web browser or our new
toolbar.

1 Comments:

At 2:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yahoo has done this more than once. Once a complaint is made to Yahoo, Yahoo reports these sites to the NCMEC, who then reports it to law enforcement, who then arrests the innocent person who had his or her credit card stolen, who’s life is then destroyed. Trust me, I speak from personal experience. It is especially disheartening that the ISP doesn’t check to make sure the data provided for the transaction is accurate (as in our case the address on file with our card company was not that used) but reports it anyway. Of course, Yahoo says the card holder owns the site, but then requires a supeona for any data related ti ut. And, of course, we did have copies of affidavits of fraudulent activity that we sent to our CC company that the police chose to ignore. Eventually, the charges were dropped, but that didn’t stop the destruction of our lives.

 

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