Businesses Facilitating 'Identity Theft'

[tw]

from ABC News
BOTHELL, Wash., Oct. 12, 2004 — Andrew is a healthy 5-month-old, but according to bill collectors, just three weeks after he was born he walked into an Edmonds family clinic on his own, got treated for a lumbar disc displacement and was given a narcotic to help ease the pain.

His mother and father got a $94 bill in the mail for the treatment and prescription.

"To receive the mail with his name on it was very bizarre," his mother, Katrina, told ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle.

It is bizarre, and Andrew may be the youngest person ever to become a victim of identity theft.

He didn't even have a Social Security number, but someone used his first and middle names — though without the "w" in Andrew — included his correct mailing address, and got the clinic to prescribe them drugs.

In the meantime we still don't immediately identify the reasons for this problem - 1) no accurate method to prove you are who you claim to be, and 2) no accurate method to confirm others have not stolen your identity. Functions to protect your identity could exist. But even here, we don't even demand same. Without demanding both objectives from the law, then identify theft will always exist and will continue to increase exponentially. It may explain why Nigeria is a top three long distance phone calling country to the US. So profitable to steal identities in the US and to get US citizens to invest in people who cannot even prove they are who they claim to be.

We currently have the identity protection system we want as demonstrated by this thread. Not one poster demanded a solution. Some complained. But not one demanded a solution.