Group Recommends Identity Tsar

A working party in the UK has recommended the creation of an identity tsar to co-ordinate efforts to fight identity fraud.

We all know that identity theft is a major problem these days, and becoming more so every day. But in Britain there might finally be official action to combat it.   As National Identity Fraud Prevention Week begins in the UK, a task force of MPs, the All Party Group on Identity Theft, has recommended the creation of a post thatwould essentially be an identity fraud tsar to co-ordinate work by different organizations.   There were over 170,000 cases of identity theft in the UK last year, costing a total of around $3.5billion. Although not exclusively, much identity theft occurs online, through phishing e-mails and Trojans that install keystroke loggers. There has also been increasing concern over the amount ofinformation people put about themselves on social networking sites like Facebook, which are an open invitation to identity theft. According to Cifas, the British body charged with fraud protection, only around one per cent of identity theft cases are investigated by police.   Recent surveys have indicatedthat one in four UK residents have been affected by identity fraud.   Among the recommendations from the All Party Group were education for consumers, the idea that banks should do more toprotect customers, a hotline for victims, and, of course, the identity tsar, whose role would be to co-ordinate work by the police, government and business in combating the problem.   NigelEvans, who chaired the cross-party group, told the BBC,   "A third of people throw out sensitive material without so much as tearing it in half, andthere is such a thing as bin raiding… 22 of 36 police forces in England don’t have ID fraud in their local policing plan."