A New York State law passed on December 7 provides some much needed ammunition to help people to protect their identities.  The law, while designed to keep consumers from remaining in the dark about potential breaches to their financial information, still does not offer any additional help or resources in combating the fastest growing federal crime over the past five years.

In just five weeks, more than 200,000 New York residents have already received potentially bad news under the new law.  It requires companies and government agencies to notify consumers whenever a report containing their telephone numbers, bank account information, income, medical records and other personal information is accidentally lost and potentially disseminated.  The good news, if there is any, is that there were no instances similar to last year’s Choice Point’s case, in which thieves posing as small business customers gained access to its database and possibly compromised the information of 145,000 people.

In the biggest case, ABN Amro Mortgage Group, based in Chicago, accidentally released information on 128,000 state residents when tape containing information of about 2 million residential mortgage customers around the country was lost as it was being transported to Texas.  While ABM Amro said it has no indication that the information was misused in any way, it has generously arranged for effected customers to enroll in a credit monitoring service for 90 days at no cost.

Then tax preparer H&R Block notified almost 29,000 New Yorkers that last month, it mistakenly mailed out free copies of its tax software that included the recipients social security numbers on the mailing labels.

People who receive such notices should contact the three credit rating bureaus and put a “Fraud Alert” on their credit report, where it will remain for 90 days.  What this does is notify creditors that additional due diligence is required when a person is requesting credit and more oversight is required in order to verify that there is no situation of identity theft involved.

While these companies will sincerely apologize for any convenience that they may have caused you, that's just unacceptable.  As a consumer advocate, keep track of all your time and conversations if this were to occur to you for two reasons.  I am absolutely convinced that all expenses paid out of pocket to deal with such a situation can be recouped with the financial institution that was responsible for this.  The courts will generally balk at reimbursing you for your time spent trying to remedy this (which I'm sorry to say is a mimimum of 50 hours).  However, if you end up hiring someone to deal with the effects of identity theft, you can and most likely will be reimbursed.  They caused this problem and they should pay for resolving it. 

For more information on Identity Theft, please refer to my newsletter written last year on this very topic.