By Coralie Carlson, The Associated Press
MIAMI (AP) - Jan Nye tucked her purse away in her husband’s pickup last February for safe keeping while she went out golfing. When she returned, the pickup was gone along with her purse, Social Security card and drivers license.
But the thieves soon took something more important to Nye: her identity.
Nye, 53, a credit collections officer in Lakeland, immediately canceled her credit card, checking account and had her credit report flagged as a possible target of fraud. Nevertheless, the thieves opened up a credit card using her Social Security number and her husband’s name, then made 112 charges in three weeks.
“Every single day from Feb. 8 on, I was obsessed with this,” Nye said, describing the daily phone calls she received about new charges. “It consumed my whole life. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t talk about anything else.”
Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in Florida and in the nation, officials said Wednesday at the state’s first conference aimed at combating the crime.
About 60 representatives from law enforcement retailers and financial institutions discuss ways to combat ID theft, such as the need to control Social Security numbers and the need to allow financial institutions to file police reports.
More than 14,000 Floridians reported identity thefts last year to the Federal Trade Commission and officials say that was only a fraction of the total crimes. Nationwide, 9.9 million people were victims of identity fraud from March 2002 to March 2003, according to the FTC.
“It has reached epic proportions,” said Guy Tunnell, Commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Identity fraud can range from the low-tech, such as trash bin diving for documents with personal information, to the very high-tech, including “phishing.”
Phishing is the creation of phony Web sites or e-mails that look like they are from legitimate businesses and con victims into handing over information.
Florida has the fifth highest rate of identity theft with 80.3 victims per 100,000 people, according to the FTC. Arizona has the highest rate, followed by Nevada, California and Texas.
Attorney General Charlie Crist said he also wanted to warn holiday shoppers to be aware of thieves trying to get their personal information. Identity thieves are now using camera phones to snap pictures of credit card numbers and computer screens, he said.
Crist’s own father nearly became a victim two weeks ago, when he misplaced his credit cards, but after a quick call to his son and directions to the Web site www.myfloridalegal.com, he was able to stop the cards from being used fraudulently.
“Even the attorney general’s father can be the victim,” Crist said.
He also said he hoped stiffer penalties for identity theft cases would deter criminals. Most identity fraud crimes were misdemeanors until this year. Now they are felonies, the most serious carrying a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
In Nye’s case, she knows of $28,000 charged using her and her husband’s identity, but her persistence has kept her credit record clean and resulted in the arrest of two suspects. She called every store where purchases were made with the fraudulent credit card and tracked down video surveillance, which helped police make an arrest.
One of the suspects was already jailed on a prostitution charge, the other posted $8,000 bond and didn’t return for an arraignment. Now another credit card using her husband’s name is being used and Nye said she wonders whether her perpetrators will ever be prosecuted.
“I’m getting to the point where I think it’s not,” she said.