This Hardcover Book item from Broadway was reviewed on 27-Jun-2008.
Search ISBN:0767925866 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan Reference Book. Classifications : Personal Finance Bankruptcy Budgeting & Money Management College & Education Costs Credit Ratings & Repair Estate Planning Financial Planning Financial Planning Workbooks Insurance Money & Values Mone . Click the following link to view the cover of Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan. Related topics: Personal Finance. Bankruptcy. Estate Planning. Financial Planning. Insurance. Money & Values. Personal Taxes. Real Estate. Retirement Planning. Subjects. requestid: 50829263-8523-41dd-9bdf-5473a394c035
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1) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. Frank offers good practical advice here. This is not an incredible book by any means but more of a guidebook with examples of how to protect yourself. I think Frank a little short with the structure here and could have kept me drawn in a little bit better.¤ 2) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. There is excellent knowledge in here. Identity theft feels less likely after we made most of the changes suggested. Highly recommended.¤ 3) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. Got this book from the library, read it and then ordered copies for each of my three grown kids. It´s a little scarey at the beginning, makes you wanna crawl in a hole and avoid the world. However, it does give a number of good ideas on ways to protect your indentity later in the book. Enjoy¤ 4) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. The truth is -one can´t appreciate the vast amount of time it takes nor the physical and mental angst that comes with finding out you´ve been violated, and essentially stolen...until it lands in your own life! I applaud Mr. Abagnale for speaking out and using his wealth of knowledge and life experiences to shed light on this growing and alarming crime.
Typical and common myths that leave many people vulnerable include:
"I don´t have to worry about identity theft because I live in a small town like Mayberry, RFD!"
or "I only use one credit card so I don´t have to worry about it."
or "I only use cash or my debit card."
Or even... "I don´t have to be concerned about my credit -I have excellent credit!"
The reality is -data breaches will continue to happen as "hacking" gets more sophisticated, and criminals will continue to be at least one step ahead of us at all times. Once upon a time, our personal information was just that -ours and personal! Not anymore! Give Me Back My Credit!
¤ 5) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. It´s a fallacy that our elected officials take forever to get things done. Two examples where Washington acted with speed are with the National Do Not Call Registry and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The National Do Not Call Registry was slated to take effect on October 1, 2003, but various marketing associations challenged its legitimacy and even if the FTC had the jurisdiction to enforce it. Notwithstanding, President Bush speedily signed the bill authorizing the no-call list to go into effect in September 2003 and the United State Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the registry in February 2004.
On June 25, 2002, WorldCom revealed it had overstated its earnings by more than $7 billion by improperly accounting for its operating costs. Senator Paul Sarbanes then introduced Senate Bill 2673 that same day where it passed 97-0 less than three weeks later. The House and Senate formed a Conference Committee to reconcile the differences between Sarbanes´s bill and Representative Michael Oxley´s bill (HR 3763) and on July 24, 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed.
The bottom line is that when politicians really want votes and PR, they can act swiftly. The frustration is exacerbated when politicians choose to do nothing when it comes to identity theft. In Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan, Frank Abagnale details the frustration that consumers face (and will face in the years to come) when their identities are stolen, the ease at which the criminals carry out such crimes, and the months and often years of effort required to regain ones identity.
Abagnale´s tenure on the criminal side long ago gives him the advantage that he knows firsthand how criminals think and such an outlook is pervasive throughout the book. Looking at the current state of identity protection, he states that he is personally horrified at how easy identity theft is. In fact, he calls it "a crook´s dream come true". The book details incident after incident where criminals and criminal gangs obtained credit in someone else´s name with ease.
What makes this worse is that the book shows how we haven´t even scratched the surface of the identity theft problem. Everyone, including the FTC agrees that current identity theft figures are quite low, due to the fact that so many cases go unreported or undetected.
The book notes that lenders often miscategorize a good deal of identity theft because it looks like delinquent bills, as opposed to a crime. Only later does the victim realize what has been going on and complains, at which time it becomes apparent that fraud was involved. But by that time, the money has been written off as a credit loss and then appears as negative information on the victim´s credit report.
Like many other books on the subject of identity theft, Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan covers the main issues, and makes numerous suggestions on how to control your identity. What is interesting about the book is that Abagnale also focuses on why identity theft is so popular for today´s criminals. One of the main reasons it that the person committing the crime has the odds significantly stacked in their favor. The book quotes a Gartner study that found that identity thieves have roughly a 1 in 700 chance of getting caught by law enforcement, which is a figure any criminal would jump at.
The books 13 chapters are written in an easy to read and compelling style. The early chapters detail the prime causes of what makes identity theft such a problem and astutely notes that a large part of the problem is that financial services companies are conducting business today by doling out credit like candy and do almost nothing to ascertain that people really are who they say they are when applying for credit. In addition, issuers of credit in their haste to rack up more business frequently accept a social security number from an applicant at face value, without demanding proof. The book lists many examples of where children and dead people have been given credit.
In chapter 6, the book lists 20 steps one can take in the hope of preventing identify theft. The author notes that since the punishment for identity theft, and the recovery of stolen goods from identity theft are so low, the only viable source of action is prevention by the individual. All 20 steps are fundamental, from protecting your social security number and examining your financial statements, to using a shredder and more.
Chapter 8 lists one of the more important points of the book, in which Abagnale writes that all credit and personal information should be opt-in based, as opposed to the prevalent opt-out requirement. Such an approach is what one would hope Congress would mandate, but does not have the tenacity to do. The problem is that if a consumer does not opt-out, they are giving the financial institution permission to share their personal information with the hundreds and often thousands of affiliates they share data with.
Companies obviously prefer opt-out, which shifts the burden to the consumer to take action to keep their information from being shared. With opt-in, the burden shifts and the financial services company has to prove that consumers granted their consent to have their personal information shared. National opt-in requirements would significant stem the flow of personal information, which is in part why identity theft is so easy to carry out.
Aside from a glaring error in chapter 12 where Abagnale erroneously writes that true authentication is impossible on the Internet and occasionally hawking companies he has financial dealings with, Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan is an interesting and entertaining book on a subject of the fasting growing crime in the USA.
The book details what happens when an apathetic Congress and financial services industry do almost nothing to protect their constituents, and the thieves who have never had it easier. These identity thieves are able to acquire gigabytes of personal information without ever having to leave their workstations. When you factor in that the odds are in their favor of never being prosecuted, it leaves nearly every individual at risk for identity theft.
With Congress dropping the ball and doing nothing, Abagnale shows that it is up to each individual to take responsibility for protecting their own personal information. Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan is indeed a great place to start such an approach.
¤ 6) Hardcover Book Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan by Broadway. The charismatic forger immortalized in the film Catch Me If You Can exposes the astonishing tactics of today’s identity theft criminals and offers powerful strategies to thwart them based on his second career as an acclaimed fraud-fighting consultant.
Consider these sobering facts:
*Six out of ten American companies and government agencies have already been hacked.
*An estimated 80 percent of birth certificate requests are fulfilled through the mail for people using only a name and a return address. So I could take your name and use my address, and get your birth certificate. From there I’m off to the races.
*Americans write 39 billion checks a year, and half of these folks never reconcile their bank statements.
*A Social Security number costs $49 on the black market. A driver’s license goes for $90. A birth certificate will set you back $79.
When Frank Abagnale trains law enforcement officers around the country about identity theft, he asks officers for their names and addresses and nothing more. In a matter of hours he can obtain everything he would need to steal their lives: Social Security numbers, dates of birth, current salaries, checking account numbers, the names of everyone in their families, and more. This illustrates how easy it is for anyone from anywhere in the world to assume our identities and in a matter of hours devastate our lives in ways that can take years to recover from. Considering that a fresh victim is hit every four seconds, Stealing Your Life is the reference everyone needs by an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity theft schemes.
Abagnale offers dozens of concrete steps to transform anyone from an easy mark into a hard case that criminals are likely to bypass:
• Don’t allow your kids to use the computer on which you do online banking and store financial records (children are apt to download games and attachments that host damaging viruses or attract spyware).
• Beware of offers that appeal to greed or fear in exchange for personal data.
• Monitor your credit report regularly and know if anyone’s been “knocking on your door.”
• Read privacy statements carefully and choose to opt out of sharing information whenever possible.
Brimming with anecdotes of creative criminality that are as entertaining as they are enlightening, Stealing Your Life is the practical way to shield yourself from one of today’s most nefarious and common crimes. ¤Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 25-Jul-2008, 07679258669780767925860, 330-610-450-660-191-6IB-8 
Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan, Book, Image © Broadway
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