Watson, of Albuquerque NM, seems to have been the ringleader of the identity theft ring and was indicted on 79 counts of identity theft.

Police found stolen credit cards belonging to 31 other people when they searched Bates’ home last summer. Bates said she got the credit cards from Sanchez. They also found photocopies of 62 checks written to a gas station where Bates used to work. Bates used the check information to steal roughly $83,000 from the victims’ checking accounts.

Police also found stolen mail, and on Bates’ computers they found evidence that she was also printing fraudulent checks and driver’s licenses. As a bonus, they discovered all the material needed for manufacturing methamphetamine when they searched the shed behind her house.

Bates faces three counts of altering, forging or making a fictitious license and one count each of dealing in credit cards of another and conspiracy to commit identity theft.

Sanchez was charged with fraudulently signing credit cards and conspiracy to commit forgery. Toscano was charged with identity theft. Watson was charged with ID theft and conspiracy to commit forgery.

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Brandon of course was shocked that anyone would steal this much information from people and immediately boxed everything up and took it to the police. When Brandon arrived at the police station he was shocked to find out the police didn’t want the information and they wanted him to get rid of it. The police didn’t even want to dispose of the information properly they just wanted Brandon to dump it somewhere.

Instead of throwing the information away Brandon took the information to 9News, a local news station. 9News went through the information and found out there was information on more than 200 people from around Colorado.

The police did eventually get the files from the news station so that they can carry out their own investigation on the matter. The Hospital has already found the person to blame for the stolen records, and she has been fired. The Hospital intends to press charges on the employee.

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“To steal the identities of elderly people, especially one who has Alzheimer’s, is unfathomable,” said Paul Montemuro, assistant state’s attorney. “It’s really a terrible crime because this was when people are (sic) at their most vulnerable.”

This particular identity theft case may be unfathomable to Montemuro, but, as someone who reads and writes about identity theft every day, I know that crimes like this one happen everyday.

I find these cases especially disturbing because my parents are in their 80s and my mother has Alzheimer’s Disease. Though Mom’s been able to stay in her own home so far, we dread the day we have to move her to a secured memory-care facility. We’ve already started researching local assisted living facilities, but we know that no matter how pretty, clean and bright her next home may be, she’ll be painfully vulnerable to her caregivers there.

LifeLock reviews identity theft trends regularly, and creates new strategies to combat identity thieves who seek out victims who are most vulnerable.

When you’re faced with the heartache of a parent’s decline, disease or death, you don’t need the additional outrage of their becoming an identity theft victim. I urge anyone with elderly parents to help protect them with identity theft protection from LifeLock.

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That’s the embodiment of LifeLock culture. That’s the way they train their employees to treat their members, and that’s the way LifeLock treats their employees.

• LifeLock pays competitive salaries and gives their employees great benefits. Every employee begins their first day of work with 100% of their insurance premiums paid by the company from the first day of work. Paid benefits include health, dental, vision, life, and long and short-term disability insurance.
• LifeLock also offers optional pet insurance, cancer coverage, elder care, whole life insurance and buy-up term life insurance
• LifeLock employees enjoy stock options and a 401(k) with profit sharing and immediate vesting.
• LifeLock supports their employees’ education goals by providing up to $8,000 in tuition assistance per year.
• LifeLock recognizes how challenging it is for workers to balance their professional lives and their personal lives, so their employees are offered flexible work schedules, including options like a compressed work week, alternative start times and telecommuting.
• LifeLock also gives their employees 28 days of paid leave, plus 3 days of leave for volunteer work.
• LifeLock encourages employee advancement with oodles of training opportunities.
• LifeLock employees get recognition awards up to $500. They also get $250 gift certificates on their birthdays and $250 for employee referrals.
• And as if all that weren’t enough, they treat their workers to free massages at the office, a free catered lunch ever week and free bus passes to encourage the use of environment-friendly mass transit.
• LifeLock employee work in brand new waterfront offices with contemporary design, quiet rooms, a game room with Wii and arcade games, quiet rooms and complete kitchen facilities.
• It almost goes without saying that LifeLock also has a business-casual dress policy.

Any company that treats their employees that well can be trusted to take care of their members.

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This week there have been eight newly reported data breaches. Unlike last week when news broke about the CheckFree Corp. hacking that exposed the personal and financial information of somewhere between 160,000 and 5,000,000 consumers, there haven’t been any big breaches that we know of. As is so often the case, some of this week’s data breaches affected an unknown number of people.

• University of Rochester, NY: Hackers stole personal information including the Social Security numbers of about 450 current and former UR students.
• Columbus City Schools, OH: Police officers who went to home to serve arrest warrants for drug and car theft charges found the stolen personal information including Social Security numbers of 100 of the school district’s employees. (Add a warrant for identity theft to the list.)
• University of Oregon: A laptop containing the personal information including Social Security numbers of an unknown number of Youth Transition Program participants was stolen.
• Innodata Isogen: A laptop containing current and former employees’ personal information including Social Security numbers was stolen. The number of affected records is unknown.
• Seventh Day Adventist Church, Silver Springs, MD: A laptop containing the personal information including the Social Security numbers of 292 people was stolen and recovered.
• Continental Airlines: A laptop that containing the personal information including fingerprints and Social Security numbers of 230 employees was stolen.
• Blue Ridge Community Action, Morganton, NC: An external hard drive containing the personal information including Social Security numbers of 300 clients is missing and may have been stolen.
• Occidental Petroleum Corporation: A former employee emailed the personal information including Social Security numbers of other employees to his home computer. The number of affected employees is unknown.

These incidents bring the total number of records known to have been involved in data breaches since January 2005 to 251,155,441.

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That’s probably what two women from the Tampa area were thinking when they signed up and met David Joseph Jiminez, AKA Michael Jiminez. Unfortunately, these two ladies weren’t only unlucky in love; they were unlucky in finances, too. Jiminez conned them out of more than $100,000.

Jiminez used their personal information to open credit card accounts and then added himself as an authorized user. When the bills came due, he had them mailed to other addresses or hid them himself to avoid detection.

One of the women was left holding the bag for a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz that Jiminez bought with an altered car loan application. She can’t even sell the car to pay it off because Jiminez had already wrecked it by the time she learned of the scam.

The other woman came out of the deal in even worse shape after marrying Jiminez and becoming pregnant with his baby. He opened credit card accounts and took out cash advance loans using her identity and then tallied up a whopping $50,000 in debts.

Law enforcement officials say they think there are probably other women in the Orlando and Tampa areas who were also swindled by Jiminez. Considering Match.com has 15 million users and 20,000 new people signing up every day, Jiminez’s chances of bamboozling more than two women out of their money seems pretty good, right?

Identity thieves employ a limitless number of scams to get to their victims’ money. Match.com charges roughly $50 for a 3-month membership. When you sign up for LifeLock’s identity theft protection using the LifeLock coupon code Defense, you pay only $9 a month. Online dating services and LifeLock; they’re a perfect match.

The most common source of information for identity thieves is a lost or stolen wallet. Only LifeLock provides their customers with WalletLock, a service that helps to swiftly cancel the credit cards and official documents before thieves can use them. You have to wonder if the other companies aren’t aware of how important this protection is.

Only LifeLock monitors the thousands of known websites, chat rooms and forums that identity wholesalers use to buy, sell and trade stolen identities and personal financial information. Why don’t their competitors provide this service?

Only LifeLock monitors the millions of address changes submitted to the U.S. Postal Service. They created this service because they know ID thieves commonly divert their victims’ mail so they can more easily gather the information they need. If it happens to a LifeLock member, the company will be there to help protect them.

LifeLock knows there’s no way to absolutely prevent identity theft, but if their system ever fails in any way to protect a customer, they provide a $1,000,000 total service guarantee (Restrictions apply. See lifelock.com for details.)  and pay for any associated recovery costs.

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Pulte Homes Las Vegas Division sent out the notification letters just in time for Christmas, though the tapes containing their customers’ names, addresses, drivers’ license numbers and financial account numbers were stolen November 13.

Pulte Homes’ employees also took a hit because all their information was also on the tapes.

All of the data breach victims have been offered Experian’s Triple Advantage credit monitoring services. (Unfortunately, credit monitoring offers very limited protection because consumers are notified after fraudulent credit accounts have been opened in their names—sort of a shout out from a rural neighbor that your cow is happily out of the barn.)

“At this time it is not know whether the box was stolen with the knowledge of its contents, of the intent, know-how and ability to extract and exploit the information stored in these backup tapes,” the letter said.

There has been no mention of whether or not the data was encrypted according to best practice standards, but Poulte spokeswoman Jacque Petroulakis said there hadn’t been identity theft reports yet.

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Further investigation revealed that, according to the DCF background check, Quintana worked at the Fort Myers-Naples Dog Track. A call to the dog track revealed that, sure enough, there was an employee there using her complete name, birth date and Social Security number.

That’s when Quintana called the Lee County Sheriff’s Department and reported her identity theft.

Sheriff’s detectives arrested the identity thief December 16 at the dog track.

She said her real name is Stella Santiago. She confessed that she had been using Quintana’s identity since April 2008 and said she paid someone else $600 for all of Quintana’s personal information.

How much money would you say your identity is worth? It’s a hard thing to put a price on, unless you become a victim of identity theft and your personal information is bought and sold. In that case you might be able to put an exact monetary value on your name, date of birth and Social Security number—everything an identity thief needs to get a job, utilities and credit.

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LifeLock stepped up to help protect them.

This week Robert W. Davis, a former FEMA employee received a five year sentence to be served in a federal prison for identity theft of more than 200 people, some of them natural disaster victims applying for assistance from the federal agency.

Investigators searched Davis’ home and found mortgage applications and scraps of paper with identification information strewn about.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton told Davis, “What you did, which is really repulsive, is rather than trying to help these people, you hurt them more.”

Davis opened credit accounts worth more than $150,000, and pawned some of his purchases for roughly $24,000. Other purchases included diamond watches, steaks and lobsters. Besides his prison sentence, Davis must make almost $50,000 in restitution payments to the retailers from which he made fraudulent purchases, including the Home Shopping Network and Shop NBC.

It doesn’t take a natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s scope to leave someone vulnerable to identity theft. Identity thieves will take advantage of every opportunity to steal your identity and ruin your finances, your credit and your good name.

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