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 | Guard Against ID Theft | ||
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Karl Koessel never imagined that losing his wallet would cost him his freedom. In May 2003, six months after he'd replaced everything from his driver's license to his library card, he was arrested outside his home in Humboldt County, Cal., for failing to appear in court in Santa Clara County on charges of driving with a suspended license. "I told them I'd never had a suspended license," says Koessel, a senior technical editor at PC World magazine. "They told me to face the car and put my hands behind my back. They put me in handcuffs and put me in the back of the car."
Koessel's name ended up on an arrest warrant because a man named Daniel Davis Lucien was apparently carrying Koessel's license when he was arrested on the suspended-license charge. Thus Koessel's name appeared as an alias in law-enforcement records. When Lucien failed to appear in court to face the charges, the court issued a bench warrant for his -- and Koessel's -- arrest.
Koessel spent two nights in the Humboldt County jail before two sheriff's deputies from Santa Clara County, six hours away, came to pick him up. At the Santa Clara jail, officers took Koessel's fingerprints (for the second time), compared them with the impostor's, and quickly determined that they had the wrong person. At 5 feet 4 inches and 130 pounds, Koessel also didn't resemble his impostor, who was 5 feet 10 inches and 155 pounds. Still, it took another seven or eight hours for sheriffs to get around to releasing him. "They were busy," Koessel says dryly. He turned down their offer of a bus ticket home and asked for a ride to the house of a nearby relative. Although he's unsure how, Koessel's name has been cleared from the re-cords. There is no warrant outstanding for his arrest, according to the Santa Clara County sheriff's department.
You're in the system
A string of security breaches at banks, credit-card com- panies and commercial data aggregators, such as ChoicePoint, has Americans on high alert for financial identity theft -- that is, the use of your personal information to run up credit-card charges or raid your bank account. That kind of fraud is maddening to untangle. You can lean on the Fair Credit Reporting Act to fix your record with creditors and credit bureaus. Success sometimes requires monumental effort, but it is possible to set your record straight.
Victims of what's called criminal identity theft -- giving false ID to law enforcement -- face an even denser thicket of bureaucracy and indifference when they attempt to clear their names. If you're wanted for a crime, it's extremely difficult to get your name out of the local, state and federal databases that police use to haul in lawbreakers and that employers search to screen new hires. According to a recent study by the Better Business Bureau and the research and consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research, about 4% of the nation's identity-theft victims say their names were falsely given to law enforcement. Presumably, there are other people who have no idea that this has happened to them.
Correcting police records is difficult because there is no uniform procedure. Victims have to plead their cases with either law-enforcement agencies or the courts -- both daunting bureaucracies. Another hurdle is a deep skepticism within the criminal justice system toward people who insist they are clean. "The paperwork is sometimes called a Toddi, for "the other dude did it,'" says Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, in San Diego, which provides guidance to identity-theft victims. The phrase captures the "culture of mistrust around efforts to clear a criminal record," she says.
Endless warrants
In 2002, an alarming letter alerted Allison Curry, a fourth-grade teacher in San Diego, that there was a warrant out for her arrest in Orange County, Cal. When she looked up the arrest code in the letter, she saw that she was wanted on prostitution charges.
"I thought it was merely a mix-up," Curry says. But after she drove two hours to the Orange County sheriff's department, an officer pulled the arrest warrant and Curry recognized the person who'd given her name to the police. It was a teenager she'd mentored as a volunteer in a foster-care facility. "In the majority of cases we see, the victim knows the perpetrator," says Robert Morgester, a deputy attorney general in the special crimes unit of California's department of justice.
Curry was able to see a judge who handles warrants on a walk-in basis. Then she went to another police department, which called up the arrest record and photo. Curry's impostor, a teenager who is African American and Filipino, looks nothing like Curry, who is in her twenties and white and Japanese. Curry left thinking the warrant had been cleared. "I wish I would have gotten documentation," she says, because she recently discovered that the warrant is still active. Curry knows that the impostor somehow got her birth date and social security number, but she isn't sure if the girl was able to acquire a fraudulent ID in her name.
For two years, Curry assumed the incident was behind her. Then in 2004, she checked her credit report after being turned down for a credit card and found several fraudulent accounts in collection. One was for money owed to San Diego Superior Court. Remembering an online link she'd used earlier, she checked for arrest warrants and found another one in her name in San Diego. This time, it took three visits to the county courthouse, but she came away with a form that verifies she is not the Allison Curry wanted for prostitution. "There's so much bureaucracy -- wait in line, come back another day," Curry says.
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