Seniors get hard truth about identity theft

Police Detective Jason Tosta’s 3-year-old son can turn on his dad’s smartphone, enter his password, watch his favorite videos on YouTube, switch over to camera mode, take his sister’s picture and email it to his mom.

The point, other than he’s one bright kid?

We live in a high-tech world, and if a child of 3 can do all of that, it’s easy to understand how even moderately tech-savvy criminals can steal valuable personal information from phones, credit and debit cards, and even trash.

Tosta and fellow Turlock police Detective Tim Redd educated and alarmed a mostly senior-citizen audience on Friday at the Covenant Village of Turlock retirement community with a presentation on identity theft.

Tosta, 44, said even detectives his age are playing tech catch-up with some crooks. To the seniors, he said, “They’re way ahead of you in the game.”

Redd shared that his own mother fell prey to a scam phone call telling her she owed money immediately or the Internal Revenue Service would send police to arrest her. “I told her, ‘We don’t call people to tell them we’re coming to get them.’”

Unfortunately, before calling him, she already had shared her Social Security number, so she now is stuck having to check her credit report every year for the rest of her life to make sure nothing is amiss, Redd said.

“When you walk out of here, you’re going to be afraid to use anything but cash,” Redd told the audience of nearly 60 people.

The men gave the crowd plenty to worry about but made sure to share basics on identity protection, too.

First, the fear

Average, law-abiding Americans use perhaps 10 percent to 13 percent of the Internet, the detectives said. Beyond that, they said, is what’s called the “deep, dark Web,” where people do everything from hire hit men to buy narcotics and personal identification.

But even within that 10 percent or so are any number of websites and services that criminals can tap to target victims. For example, sites that help users locate people for a fee offer a lot of family tree information: people’s siblings, parents, children, grandchildren. That kind of information – knowing that a Mary Jones in Turlock has a grandson, Bob Smith, in Dallas – is how criminals pull scams such as calling and posing as a grandchild in a financial bind who needs money fast.

Tosta and Redd demonstrated that the majority of Friday’s attendees put themselves at risk just in the time they were in the room. Eighty percent of the audience filled out door-prize slips that were placed on their seats, asking for name, address, phone number and email. Spending less than a minute on his smartphone, Redd rattled off information – previous addresses, relatives’ names, etc. – he was able to get online just from those bits of information.

For every headline-grabbing case such as the 2013 Target stores data breach, far more people are at risk every day from small-time crooks who break into a bank of mailboxes or steal information from papers tossed in the trash, the detectives said.

Tosta told of a case he’s working in Turlock that has 110 victims, “and the suspect lives about four blocks from you guys.” Like an accountant, Tosta said, the suspect kept very thorough notebooks containing names, addresses, dates of birth, account numbers. When he used stolen account information, Tosta said, he’d even enter a note on what it was, such as signing up for cellphone service.

Be attentive

The age group that has the highest percentage of reported victims, the detectives said, is 18- to 29-year-olds: 29 percent. By contrast, people 60 and older account for only 9 percent of reported ID theft victims. But it’s not that seniors are being victimized less – it’s that they’re not noticing it, not reporting it, at the level of the younger victims.

Many seniors are inattentive to their financial security, Tosta and Redd said, and look only at printed bank statements every 30 days or so. In between those statements, they’re becoming victims.

Seniors also are more likely to toss important information in the trash, and the crooks know it, the detectives said. There likely are criminals who think, “Seniors are lax on their personal security, so let’s hit the bins at Covenant Village right before every trash pickup day.”

So, what to safeguard? Papers that carry your name, date of birth, Social Security number, and/or any credit card or banking account numbers. And how? The detectives highly advise getting a shredder, and not just one that cuts paper into strips, but a crosscut shredder.

Be careful about giving your credit or ATM card even to employees of businesses and restaurants. At your friendly neighborhood fast-food drive-through, a cashier could be concealing a device that scans and stores information from your card, later downloading that personal information. Don’t let cashiers walk out of sight with your card, Tosta said. The only absolutely safe way is to pay cash, he said, but the next best is to patronize stores and restaurants where you slide the payment card yourself.

When submitting a card to a cashier, insist he or she ask for your ID, Redd said. Store employees typically are told by their managers not to ask for ID because customers consider it an inconvenience. Shoppers need to let them know it’s not an inconvenience, but important.

Tosta warned against carrying a checkbook. “Checks are becoming obsolete,” he said, noting that pretty much every bill you pay on a regular basis can be set up for automatic withdrawal through your bank or a service provider.

Even at a trusted place such as a doctor’s office, Tosta said, don’t automatically provide your Social Security number on a form just because there’s a spot for it. Staff usually will work with you, he said, entering that information into the office’s computer without having it on a paper that could be stolen in a break-in.

And when asked for information over the phone or in person, think carefully before answering, Redd said. “If they ask you to confirm your information, ask them to give it to you” first, he said. “Confirming” means just that – saying that information the questioner claims to already have is accurate.

This story was originally published May 18, 2015 at 7:38 PM with the headline "Seniors get hard truth about identity theft."