COMMENT: Identity thief appears one step ahead

8:07am Tuesday 20th May 2008

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IDENTITY theft is one of those crimes that we think will never happen to us. Yet it is the fastest-growing crime in Britain - up by 500 per cent since the turn of the century.

Mohammed Taj, who features on our front page today, is living proof that the hi-tech scammers who make money from ID theft can strike anywhere.

Mr Taj is extremely careful. He does not use a debit card, he does not use the internet, he rarely uses cash machines, and uses a home shredder to destroy documents that contain his personal information.

Yet still thieves managed to get hold of his details and use them to withdraw more than £2,500 from his bank account.

And just to emphasise how this type of crime is a global affair, the withdrawals were made in Australia.

Mr Taj's bank says "just one use" of a cash machine or a credit card in a shop can lead to ID theft, which is a statement that should concern us all.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 a year in the UK fall victim to ID fraud, costing the country around £1.7 billion a year.

It is clearly a huge problem to which there is no easy solution.

We all have to be ultra-careful with our personal information but the painful truth is that the technical abilities of those who commit such crimes appear always to be one step ahead of those whose job it is to stop them.