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 | Guard Against ID Theft | ||
| Don't Let ID Thieves Steal You Blind | ||
What about a lawyer?
Couldn't a quick call to a lawyer solve this mess in a hurry? Not necessarily.
Tom Maslanka of Kissimmee, Fla., thought he was the target of a practical joke when he got a phone message from a local deli accusing him of writing a bad check for $400 worth of hot dogs. Next came another message, accusing him of bouncing a check for a swimming-pool sweeper and other merchandise and services. At the urging of his wife, Beata, Maslanka filed a police report to document that someone had stolen his identity.
That was a critical move. A year later, police came looking for Maslanka at the furniture store he owns, Modern Day Furniture, in Intercession City. "They cuffed me and put me in the car," Maslanka says. An hour later, after he asked his wife to bring the police report and other documentation of the identity theft, he was released. It also helped that he doesn't resemble the 5-foot 8-inch, 180-pound man who was using his name; Maslanka is 6 feet 1 inch and weighs 300 pounds. But the police didn't cancel the arrest warrant.
Maslanka later coasted through a stop sign and once again spent an hour talking his way out of handcuffs. "A friend who works in the judicial system told me the warrant would be with me forever if I didn't get it taken off," he says. So he consulted a lawyer, whose solution was for Maslanka to allow himself to be arrested (and possibly jailed) and then fight the record in court. "I told him no way I was going to get arrested," says Maslanka. He also didn't relish the idea of paying a lawyer $3,000 or more "to get me off for something I didn't do." Instead he wrote several letters to Lawson Lamar, the state attorney (equivalent to a district attorney in other states) for Florida's ninth circuit, asking that the warrant be temporarily removed while he contested it. A year later, Maslanka checked an arrest-warrant database and found that his warrant had not been reinstated. Still, he carries his documents everywhere he drives.
Maslanka asked Kiplinger's not to contact the state attorney to check on his case, for fear that the inquiry might reactivate the warrant. That's a realistic concern, says Foley. "All too often, people try to clean things up and the next thing they know they're right back in the soup."
Employment concerns
Scott Lewis's wrongful criminal record was the result of a clerical error rather than the actions of an identity thief. A county sheriff mistakenly typed Lewis's social security number into the record of a man who had been arrested for drunk driving and charged with murder. Lewis, an x-ray technician in Wintersville, Ohio, was turned down for job after job before he learned the reason. Employers who were running background checks wanted nothing to do with him. Employers are supposed to tell job applicants if they're turned down because of specific information discovered in a background check, "but oftentimes they don't," Givens says.
What if Allison Curry tired of her teaching job and wanted to move on? "That would be a nightmare," says Morgester. Foley worries that Curry's current job is in peril while she attempts to enroll in the state's registry. Even if the official records are corrected, "somewhere in a private database, that uncorrected information is still out there," says Morgester. The Internet age has brought a proliferation of data brokers (such as ChoicePoint) that gather and resell personal information, and it would be difficult to know how far and wide an error has traveled or who was responsible. That's why Lewis was rejected for so many jobs even after police corrected the mistake in their records.
The best solution, Morgester says, is to tell employers up front that you've been a victim of identity theft. If you feel comfortable, recount the entire episode and how it happened. If you have reason to suspect something is fishy, run a background check on yourself and, if necessary, go to court. But even when you provide documentation, employers may still feel they're taking a risk. "I assume companies are like, "Why bother? This is baggage city,'" says Lewis, who works part-time as a surgical technologist but is still hunting for full-time work. "I don't think it's ever going to go completely away," he says. "The past ten years of my life have been hell."
-- Research: Jessica Anderson
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