Identity Theft Keeps Haunting Its Victims

It all started in 1996 when Mary V. de George, a Silver Lake resident, wrote a $10 check to First Card.

It was cashed, but not by First Card, for $1,800. Someone had intercepted the payment and drastically upped the amount, then somehow managed to cash the fraudulent check.

Bank of America, which paid out the money, was understanding. It ate the loss, and De George got a new checking account.

The incident seemed isolated. But then, early this year, when she applied for a business credit card, it was denied after the credit bureau Equifax reported that she had failed to pay some credit card bills. De George soon discovered that an unknown person or persons for months had been applying for credit cards and accumulating thousands of dollars in debt by using her name and Social Security number. The cards had been sent to addresses unfamiliar to De George in central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

In short, she was another victim of identity theft.

It’s been growing worse for her. As she has tried to assemble the paperwork necessary to get Equifax to erase the bad entries, De George has discovered other thefts at every turn.

First Card recently canceled her authentic credit card, and her telephone company, PacBell, informed her that someone in Van Nuys had used her identity to run up a $357 debt the phone company had already put out to collection. The other two big credit bureaus, Experian and Trans Union, will be notified.

And, according to De George, the police have not been too helpful. She says she went to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Northeast station, but was not allowed to file a crime report until she verified each case in which her name had been used fraudulently.

With understandable hyperbole, De George told me: “My life is destroyed. I need some help in this. I need one person to say, ‘Mary, we’re on your side.’ ”

Actually, help is on the way. Legislation passed last year in Sacramento, with the key provisions due to go into effect July 1, makes it clear that citizens whose identities are stolen--not just the credit card companies that go unpaid--must be considered victims of such crime.

Most important, the new law says that when citizens send police reports on identity theft to the credit bureaus, the bureaus will be required to delete erroneous entries.

Ed Howard of the Center for Law in the Public Interest wrote the law with the help of Thomas A. Papageorge, head of the L.A. County district attorney’s consumer protection division. Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles) carried the measure, and Murray aide Stacy Dwelley worked to placate various lobbies and secure approval.

More often than the public realizes, government and nonprofit personnel work in such a fashion for the public good.

But problems remain.

For one thing, as De George has found, identifying all the separate transgressions can be an endless task. No sooner may a victim succeed in deleting some false items from a credit report than others may appear.

It also is unclear whether often overburdened police agencies will have sufficient resources to diligently implement the new law.

“The police are part of the problem,” said a lobbyist who asked not to be identified. “These laws are messy, time consuming and people will be pointing their fingers at one another. The police won’t have the manpower to cope.”

At the LAPD, however, detectives say they have developed procedures to take such crime reports from Los Angeles residents, though not from nonresidents.

The reason De George apparently received no cooperation from LAPD officers at the Northeast station was that the thefts of her identity took place before the law fully went into effect.

Also, explained Det. Miguel Valenciana, the officer who dealt with De George “may not have had much familiarity with all this.” The officer’s badge number showed he was a new member of the force.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Experian said the industry fears that the law, the first of its kind, may compromise the integrity of credit reporting.

“Our No. 1 concern is that the credit repair firms--the companies consumers can hire to restore their credit for a fee--are going to have a field day filling out fraudulent police reports,” said Maxine Sweet, an Experian vice president.

However, the D.A.’s Papageorge noted that filing a false police report can lead to a perjury charge.

Even if credit bureau reports are cleansed, experts point out that big financial institutions now rely on their own “credit scores” to determine whether to loan consumers money.

These lenders are said to issue each potential borrower a score, based partly on credit bureau information, partly on the assessment of such specialized “credit scoring” firms as Fair, Isaac & Co. of San Rafael, Calif., and partly on their own calculations.

These, which many customers do not even know about, are not covered by the new law.

I asked Bank of America whether it releases individual credit scores to customers who want them.

Gerry Gunn, executive vice president for risk management, said no.

“The scores we develop may be customized for a given [loan] product,” Gunn said. “So you may have more than one score, and some of the numbers are meaningless without knowing their full context.”

Gunn added, “If these got out, someone committing identity theft might try to steal the identity of those with better scores.”

Maybe so, but word that there is another set of scores out there raises concerns that cleansing one’s credit rating of falsehoods and thefts, or even knowing every place it should be cleansed, will remain a major challenge to victimized consumers.

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Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060, or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com