'Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic' by Bob Sullivan

Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic. Bob Sullivan. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons. 2004. 314 pages including appendix (how to protect yourself), notes and index. ISBN: 0471648108. Available from Amazon.com for $17.61

Identify theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States. Whose fault is it? The individuals who don't protect their identities properly...or the financial and government organizations to whom they entrust their personal information, in the belief that these huge companies do all they can to safeguard this vital data?

Take the first six months of 2005, for example. In February Bank of America reported that computer tapes containing data for some 1.2 million U.S. government employees had vanished. In May, Time Warner said an outside storage company lost computer backup tapes containing data on 600,000 current and former employees. Just this month (June) Citicorp lost information on 3.9 million customers, which they had attempted to send to a credit bureau via UPS. Other companies have also reported missing data.

This rash of lost information has got to be frightening and frustrating, not only to the general public but to all the authors out there, who have published book after book over the last decade about the problem of identity theft and how to prevent it. And yet it would appear that the companies to whom this information would be of most value haven't bothered to read them.�

Your�Evil Twin�is not a manual on how to prevent identity theft, but rather a series of non-fiction horror stories: some of the perpetrators and their schemes, most of the victims and how much they suffer.

Some examples:

Malcolm Bird, an African-American, spent five years of his life being arrested for crimes an impostor committed, and having to prove over and over again that his identity had been stolen:
"Malcolm Byrd was at home with his two children on a Saturday night in January 2003 when a pounding knock came at the door. Three Rock County, Wisconsin, sheriff's officers were there with a warrant for Byrd's arrest. Cocaine possession, with intent to distribute, the warrant read.

This time, Byrd thought, I just can't take it any more. Why bother to explain.? During all the other arrests, all the other times he'd been fired from his job, the times his driver's license had been taken away, no one listened. It's because I'm black, he thought. No one believes a black man when he says he's innocent. No one believes a black man when he says he's innocent. No one believes him when he says, "You've got the wrong man."

Arlene Cling, a widow in her mid-80s, had her house sold out from under her:
" �How can they do do that and take our house? We never had it for sale or rent or anything,' said Arlene Cling, a widow in her mid-80s, in front of her San Diego home. But it was true. Someone had stolen Cling's personal information, gone to the bank, sold her home, and pocketed the cash.

�All I know is we got this letter that the house had been taken - sold - and we...we didn't sell it,' she told NBC's Kevin Tibbles."

The benefits of identity theft for the criminal:
"More Americans are victims of identity theft than any other crime in America now, and there's a reason: For criminals, the rewards are high, and the risks are infinitesimal. By one example, only 1 out of every 700 identity theft crimes are ever prosecuted."

"Once it is determined a fraud has been committed the company never contacts you again. My SSN was used in Cleveland and Detroit to buy cell phones; $1,000 in charges were run up. I asked the fraud dept. if they could notify me if the people were caught; I was told �Read the newspaper.' The fraud departments aren't talking to the police and no one is talking to the victims."�

Author Bob Sullivan is a senior writer at MSNBC.com, and is the nation's leading journalist covering identity theft. He won the 2002 Society of Professional Journalists Public Service Award for his series of articles on online fraud.

In Your Evil Twin, Sullivan brings his expertise to bear once more. His final chapter is called What Now, and deals with "what can be done to regain control of your out-of-control digital twin?"

He advocates that the government cease coddling the credit industry. He talks about biometrics, about electric ATM cards that are surgically implanted in human flesh. He talks about training police officers for the possibility that people who claim �you have the wrong person' might be telling the truth.

Sullivan closes with a plea of a �return to sanity' for those who use credit.

"Since the foundations of the credit card business in the 1950s, the industry has been focused entirely on convincing consumers to give in to their most basic urges, to surrender tomorrow for today, to buy on credit no matter what the cost. It's an industry designed to convince Americans we can have everything we want today, and in fact, we can have a whole lot of things we don't want. Not only has the industry contributed to, and practically caused, the personal bankruptcy crisis, the credit industry has also enabled the identity theft crisis."

Another must read.