subject: How Can You Prevent Criminal Identity Theft? [print this page] Those individual show commit identity theft are always not out to steal your money and ruin your credit as there can be even criminal identity theft. This identity theft mainly occurs when the criminal uses your name on their arrest or when the criminal is being investigated.
The personal identity they provide offer the law enforcement officer might include your date of birth, driver's license and even social security number. The criminals might also provide a fake license which contains their picture but with someone else's data.
How can criminals assume your identity?
With most of the cases the criminal would fraudulently access the driver's license or identification card with the victim's name and address and present these documents to the law enforcement officer. They might also commit criminal id theft by utilizing the address and name of a relative or friend without displaying a photo identification.
Most often this information is not enough to get the criminal off their deeds to with a simple quote or an instant release from their arrest. After they have signed the quote and promise to appear with accounts the thief would not show up again. Therefore this would lead the judge to issue bench warrant in the name of some innocent victim.
The consequences of criminal id theft
Unfortunately, the victim of criminal id theft might also not know that there has been a warrant issued under their name until long. The victim might generally find out after they are detained on a regular traffic stop and arrested for the outstanding warrant. However by this time the criminal id theft victim might find themselves in a huge amount of financial and legal trouble.
There are also come cases where the criminal id theft would appear in the court for the violation or for entering guilty plea without the knowledge of its victim. In case the criminal finds they are blocked for a serious crime like drunk driving they would simply provide someone else's personal data. The name of the victim would be entered in the countrywide criminal database along with a huge mark on their record.
There are also some cases in criminal identity theft where the victim does not know about the impersonation until they are denied of employment or expelled from a job. This generally happens when the employer conducts criminal background search and expels the victim after finding they have a recent criminal record. They might also be charged for not letting the organization know about their criminal activity by terminating them from their job.
Fighting criminal id theft
Similar to other types of identity theft the victims of criminal theft are also left with burden of cleaning their name from the criminal justice system. You should act quickly if you nee to minimize the damages and to get back your life.
However the process can be quite difficult as the officials working with criminal justice system are the only people having the right to correct the data on your report. Although this type of id theft has become much common there is still no standard procedure to clear the wrongfully accumulated records.
