Released: June 05, 2007

New-account fraud difficult to detect

Source: Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz, USA Today

After graduating from high school, David Joe Hernandez served four years in the Air Force at bases in New Mexico and Japan. So it came as a shock when he returned home to Oak Forrest, Ill., and discovered collections agents were hunting him down to make good on some 20 delinquent accounts.

That was in November 2004. Hernandez spent hours trying to clear up the mistakes through Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, the Big Three credit-reporting agencies. But things got worse. He learned he was linked to a string of felonies, including a drug charge that hindered him from landing a job at Best Buy. Then last August, state regulators began garnishing his wages to pay child support to a woman in Chicago he’d never heard of.

“I was astonished,” Hernandez says. “One thing after another kept turning up, and it couldn’t have been me because I wasn’t even in the area.” Hernandez was the victim of new-account fraud — the most difficult type of identity theft to detect, resolve and prosecute.

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