Identity Theft

Identity theft is a term first emerging in U.S. literature circa 1996. The earliest internet references concern a lobby of the United States Federal Trade Commission for regulation concerning the criminal abuse of consumers' personal identifiers. The main concern for consumers is financial crimes exploiting their credit worthiness to commit loan fraud, mortgage fraud, lines-of-credit fraud, credit card fraud, commodities and services frauds.

The common denominator to these crimes is a reliance by lenders and vendors on shared use of highly centralized national credit-rating services. With the centralization of financial services and the emergence of national retail outlets, businesses no longer personally know their customers. These facts do not escape the criminals. Other consumer crime "identity theft" statistics include check kiting, the bleeding of personal savings accounts, and theft and fraudulent use of credit cards.

"Identity theft" in itself is an oxymoron, generating confusion in circles attempting to reconcile the term with the crime. In the purest linguistic sense, someone's identity cannot be stolen. Human identity is a psychological or philosophical conversation. However, a person's "means of identification" can be used unlawfully and their "identification documents" can be stolen.

Some people prefer the term "identity fraud" to describe when their means of identification has been exploited for an unlawful purpose. Others believe the thief does deprive the owner of his identity by replacing his reputation with the thief's. Many uses of the term focus on the act of acquiring the personal information necessary to perpetrate the personation.