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Giving Credit Where Credit Is Not Due The big identity-theft bust last week was just a taste of whats to come. Heres how to protect your good name. HERES THE SCARY THING about the identity-theft ring that the feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40,000 victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their names. Cost to the victims: $3 million and rising. Even scarier is that this, the largest identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700,000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. Its one of crimes biggest growth markets. A name, address and Social Security number--which can often be found on the Web--is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so theres little financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure. As it stands now, its up to you to protect your identity. The good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take. Most credit thieves are opportunists, not well-organized gangs. A lot of them go Dumpster diving for those millions of pre-approved credit-card mailings that go out every day. Others steal wallets and return them, taking only a Social Security number. Shredding your junk mail and leaving your Social Security card at home can save a lot of agony later. | 
