Cover
Private lives
by Amanda Spratt
When it comes to identity theft, sometimes you can’t even trust your friends. And, as Sonja Bury found out, even the most innocuous document can land you in serious trouble without your knowledge.
The first time Sonja Bury knew she was liable for a loan of thousands of dollars was when the finance company called to demand payment. “They rang me at work to say I was late on my payment, and I was like, ‘Payment of what?’”
The 27-year-old was shocked to discover that she had defaulted on a $6000 loan to Pacific Retail Finance – a loan she had never taken out.
After many hours, a lot of stress and a police investigation, Bury learnt that she had been the victim of identity crime, perpetrated by an old school friend, Philippa Millanta.
When Millanta appeared in court last month, she pleaded guilty to 11 charges of fraud involving loans totalling almost $20,000. She had used the personal details of three friends and those of her older sister. She will be sentenced next week.
Bury was amazed to learn how easy it was to commit the offences: a name, birth date and a bit of computer handiwork was all Millanta needed to take out fraudulent loans from reputable companies. “It’s scary how little information you need and how little checking is done.”
To approve Millanta’s application, says Bury, all that Pacific Retail required was proof of income, photo ID and a good credit rating. Millanta, a former bank employee who had seen many examples of payslips, simply mocked up a fake one from Bury’s employer.
For the photo ID, Millanta got a bit more creative by changing the name on her own driver’s licence and sending a scanned copy to the finance company. The facial features are barely distinguishable and at the time, the finance company didn’t have facilities to check that the name on the licence matched the licence number.
Pacific Retail did run a credit check, but Millanta knew Bury was a safe bet. A few months before Millanta applied for the loans, the two had met for lunch and Bury, knowing her friend was struggling financially, gave her bags of food.
Deceitfully obtaining a loan from a finance company is on the minor side of identity crime, says Detective Sergeant David Kennedy, head of the Identity Intelligence Unit that deals with illegal immigration scams, drug smuggling and large-scale money-laundering, among other things. This type of misuse of identity falls under the general umbrella of fraud, so police don’t have specific statistics, but Kennedy says the incidence is definitely growing.
Some within the security industry say that the frequency of cases of defrauding financial institutions is starting to rival burglaries and car thefts.
Bury was lucky: Millanta slipped up and used her personal email address for some applications, which gave police something to follow.
In many cases, though, the crime goes undetected or is hard to investigate, Kennedy says. Finance companies often don’t realise they’ve been duped and they treat it as just another bad debt.
Finance companies bear the cost of fraudulent debts, says PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ forensic computing expert Chris Budge, but an individual must first prove their innocence. “You will always owe that money until you prove it wasn’t you. Finance companies go around with the attitude that the consumer is wrong, not that they’re wrong, and that’s a dangerous point for the consumer.”
There are other costs for the customer, too. US research shows that it takes an average of three to five years for a person to clear their name with credit-rating agencies and get their fraud-free identity back.
Finance companies stand by their verification processes. A spokesperson for GE Money, the company that acquired Pacific Retail two years ago, says it now has the ability to verify driver’s licences with the Land Transport Safety Authority, and it is “unlikely” that someone using the same methods as Millanta would slip through the checks.
Bury says that Pacific Retail was good to deal with, but a year later, credit-rating agency Baycorp still has an entry of fraud by Bury’s name, making it difficult for her to get loans or goods on hire purchase. And, she says, the experience has shaken her trust in people, making her more cautious about giving out personal details, especially on the internet.
“It’s scary. I never give any details over the phone to anyone. My gym rang me to update my membership details and I said I’d come in and do it. I never enter competitions.”
She has pages on social networking websites such as MySpace, but has now removed personal details, including photos, and restricted access to friends.
“It’s amazing what you can find out about people on the internet,” says Bury. “People don’t realise that anyone in the world can see it.”
Log onto MySpace or Bebo and you can find out anything from a person’s age to their sexual orientation. Some people even post their addresses and cellphone numbers on the net.
“Today’s youth don’t share the same definition of privacy as their parents or grandparents did,” says Meredith Bean, a doctorate student in sociology at Auckland University. “Twenty years ago, you would have had to go through someone’s trash can to find out the same details and it would have been seen as a major invasion of privacy.”
But opening up online can be problematic, she says. Some of life’s nastier creatures, for example, get through virtual safety nets, and employers are increasingly turning to the net to check a prospective employee’s past.
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