The New Identity Theft – Businesses are victims too

The 9/23 Denver Post Article on Business Identity Theft is a “Must Read” (CLICK)!

Especially if you are calling on business owners or top executives of privately owned businesses. The article focuses on Denver, however they explain that this is an easy hit, and likely happening all over the country! Here are the basic sound bites, then read the article to fill in the details…if you know of other articles on this subject, please reference them in the comments section of this blog post…I think business owners will get this message if delivered properly.

It’s easy! “Corporate information is hijacked and millions of dollars in phony credit purchases are made…”

1. Corporations are all registered online today, so with an Internet access point, anyone can access public records of a corporation. The point of doing this is to make changes, which anyone can do if they pay the fee – which might be around $10. By doing this you can simply add your name to the corporate records as an officer. Another tact is to find the corporate records of a dormant account – a company that is not active, of which there are many.

2. Once this is in place, the new officer can apply for credit. The credit checks will be done through D&B and of course they will be looking at the public records to verify that you are in fact an officer. (Note, it is possible to protect this information, however it costs more money and many companies have not spent the extra money to do this).

3. Once credit is approved, and given this is a company, credit allowances are likely to be much larger that individual credit lines, the fake officer now has the ability to get credit cards and begin spending. This is so easy, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to figure it out.

What’s the point? If you sell information security solutions, you now have one more thing to advise executives on. The key to selling security is demonstrating an ability to measure impact and likelihood of loss, and then showing that likelihood is higher than expected and high enough to demand action. This is just one more area where likelihood is high, and business owners are in the dark.