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Over in Britain, identity thieves have been hitting people hard.
According to CIFAS, Britain's fraud prevention service, there were approximately 80,000 cases of identity theft in 2006. This made identity theft Britain's fastest-growing crime.
According to figures published by Britain's Home Office in February of 2006, they officially estimated the total loss that could be attributed to identity theft as being upwards of £1.7 billion. An exact number would be next to impossible to find, but experts expect the actual loss to identity theft in Britain could be a lot more.
Mohammed Amir Ali knows the damage that identity thieves can do to a person's life. He's an identity theft victim that has been hit especially hard by identity thieves.
I have had letters almost on a weekly basis accusing me of things I have not done. I tell them and have written countless letters but no one seems to listen. The total figure in fines and court costs rattled up from these parking tickets is being estimated at £10,000, but I will not being paying a penny of it.
After receiving a letter in the mail in 2006 about a car accident in London that he was supposedly involved in, when he hadn't been to that city in quite some time, Mohammed Amir Ali thought that there must have been a simple mix-up. Unfortunately, Mohammed's situation wasn't that simple. He was an unknowing identity theft victim.
Within weeks I got a letter about a different car from a hire company and a letter about parking tickets. They were from companies asking for their car back. Then they sent me a letter saying I had not paid my bill because I had had the car for too long. I contacted the company and they said, 'Write us a letter'. So I did, and I decided to go to police. I asked for a crime reference number and they would not give me one because they said it was a civil matter. They told me to write a letter to the hire company and the company with the parking tickets. I wrote about nine or ten letters.
Mohammed Ali has had several visits from bailiffs, who keep demanding that he pay them for parking tickets that the guy who stole his identity had racked up.
The police said, 'They have a court order. You have to pay'. And I said, 'I am not paying, this is identity theft'. The police said, 'If you do not give them money, we will help them'. So I had to pay £444. Then another baliff came in front of my house and clamped my car. They said I owed £300 for a parking ticket and if I did not pay in ten minutes it would double to £600. So in the end I paid £364. My car was clamped and I need it for work.
Mohammed Amir Ali is at his wit's end. The chef, who is a father of five children, is going through what he describes as a living hell.
I cannot sleep at night and do not want to open the door. I wake up every morning wondering if the bailiffs will come today. If this problem is not solved soon I am thinking of moving house and changing my name. We are all so worried.
There is very little that he can do to stop Britain's justice system from working against him, which is one reason why identity thieves there have become so brazen.
I need help from somewhere. I do not know who to turn to to stop these bailiffs. The police said that in the law's eyes, I am not the victim. The companies are the victim. But I risk losing everything. These parking tickets could add up to around £10,000 and I don't know what to do or why this is happening. It is too much stress for one man to take, and it seems there is no one who can help me.
Actually, he's right. In Britain there is very little that he can do once the identity thief already has his information and is wreaking havok with his finances.
In the United States, however, there are identity theft monitoring services that people can subscribe to. LifeLock is an especially good identity theft monitoring service, with their determination to spend up to $1,000,000 on attorneys, private investigators and other resources in order to get your financial situation back under control.
