ID theft bigger than drug smuggling

More than 10 million people in the US are victims of identity theft every year leading to losses of about $50 billion (R400 billion), says Justin Yurek, president of identity theft protection and rehabilitation company ID Watchdog.

"ID theft is now bigger than drug trafficking as a crime in the US and it is the third most talked about issue in the media there, after the war in Iraq and the presidential elections," he said yesterday, after a briefing in Cape Town.

ID Watchdog is currently on a stop-over visit in SA, drumming up international investor support ahead of its listing on the Canada's Toronto Stock Exchange later this year.

"Currently, the US financial markets are in some turmoil and so are not conducive to a listing at the moment. What we want to do is get some international investor support, list in Toronto with an eye to eventually listing on Nasdaq," Yurek said.

According to ID Watchdog's prospectus, it was founded in 2005 and has developed a methodology to determine if a client's ID has been compromised by searching about 10 000 databases that are under the control of private or government US agencies.

Yurek says that one's identity rests on the five-key elements of name, date of birth, address, social security number (ID number in SA), and telephone numbers - the elements that fraudsters most commonly use to open new mortgages, obtain credit or bank accounts in the victim's name.

"The fraudster will then usually insert something of their own into this, usually an address, in order to complete the victimisation," he said.

ID Watchdog's customer relationship management system is based on Ruby-on-Rails, because, Yurek says, it is an SQL open source database, an agile system for rapid deployment, and allows for as many safety features to be installed as the company feels is necessary.

"But it is not necessarily the technology behind us that is so important, rather it is the methodology," Yurek said.

He said ID Watchdog is the only company in the US that guarantees its clients that it will resolve their identity theft problems and that its focus is only on the consumer.

"We are fully on the side to the individual consumer. Many other companies offering some kind of identity theft protection are actually the credit record companies and they are the ones who sell their information to third parties," he said.

Yurek said that of all the countries ID Watchdog had visited, South Africans seem to be the most aware of the whole issue of identity theft. "From what I understand, there is a real issue and this relates to the whole system and how it needs to be reformed."

Yurek said ID Watchdog was examining the possibility of setting up joint ventures with local partners in the country.