When street gangs get into identity theft, you know it is pretty easy to acquire someone’s identity. In fact, the identity theft begins with the gangs stealing or gaining access in some way to Social Security Number data banks. Sometimes it is a case of hacking, high tech stuff, and sometimes it is no more than a gang members girlfriend emailing 5,000 Social Security Numbers to her home computer.
Of course there is the usual check cashing scams that go with the identity scams, as well as credit card fraud and in more elaborate cases banking and financial fraud. In California alone there are 1.5 million identity theft cases, annually. The number of cases this year is up around thirty percent.
There is an old axiom that you can take more money with a briefcase than a gun. I would imagine street gangs have embraced this time honored cliche` and in the business nomenclature are looking to diversify from robbery and drug dealing. If nothing else, they are enterprising and they are running up some pretty impressive numbers in their fraud schemes.
If you own a business, you had better be wary. If you are not running the Social Security Trace on each job candidate as part of your preemployment screening package, you are making a big mistake. The Social Security Trace is a most important background check. It will validate the social security number, verify for the most part that it actually belongs to your job applicant, and it will list the residential history of that applicant. All important stuff.
Why? For one thing it helps protect again the unwitting hire of undocumented workers, which may draw the fines and shutdowns that accompany the federal crackdowns. For another, you want to know that your employment candidate is not getting the job under false identity and then once ensconced will be making off with your proprietary and financial data and then slinking out without a trace. False name, false social security number–that employee would be difficult to track down.
If like in one of the case listed in the Los Angeles Times article that employee did steal social security numbers or credit card information and then send it home to her boyfriend’s gang, your business could suffer financial damage and much embarrassment. To say nothing of the liability issues you may be confronting.
Street gang member and other people of a less savory persuasion are out there trying to buy up whatever identity information they can. Don’t let it damage you, personally, or your business.
Check them out before you hire.
