This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A former Park City resident was surprised when he learned new credit cards had been issued in his name.
The parents of a 2-year-old Utah girl got a bigger shock when they were doing business with a credit union and discovered thieves had obtained phony credit cards with their toddler's Social Security number.
Their experiences were not unusual. A newly released federal study says identity theft fraud hit at an estimated 3.6 million households, or 3 percent of the total number of households, in the United States in 2004.
"We have been deluged with identity theft cases," said Kirk Torgensen, chief deputy Utah attorney general. "The rise has been very dramatic."
In Utah, the Identity Theft Task Force was formed in November 2004 to combat the problem. In its first 15 months, the group of federal, state and local agencies had launched 190 investigations, identified 1,366 victims of identity theft, obtained about 150 indictments and held more than two dozen training sessions on fraud prevention for law enforcement agencies, community groups and merchants.
Today, a new system that makes reporting identity theft easier will be unveiled (see box on Page B2), likely leading to even more prosecutions.
The new federal study, called the National Crime Victimization Survey, found:
* The estimated loss reported by the victims totaled $3.2 billion. The average loss was $1,290.
* The most common type of identity theft was unauthorized use of credit cards, experienced by about half the victims. Next was the theft of an existing account, such as a bank or a debit card account, followed by the use of personal information to obtain new credit cards or loans.
* The most likely targets were households with an annual income of $75,000 or more, households headed by persons ages 18 to 24, or households in an urban or suburban area.
* Thirty percent of households hit by identity theft discovered it by noticing that money was missing or that unfamiliar charges were listed on an account.
* One in four heard about it from a credit bureau.
The survey, which was conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from July to December 2004 and released on April 2, was based on interviews with 40,000 people. This was the first time the study included questions about identity theft.
In Utah, common types of ID crime are theft of mail to get credit card applications or credit card statements and the sale and use of Social Security numbers, according to Torgensen. He said the thieves use the information to assume someone else's identity and open lines of credit.
A new trend appears to be the use of the Social Security numbers of children and deceased people because their fraudulent use is unlikely to be discovered for a long time, Torgensen said. When a young victim tries to buy a first car or get a student loan, the bad credit history pops up.
In the Park City case, Jacqueline Gulla was able to make purchases totaling more than $50,000 with information found in stolen letters, authorities say. By the time police caught up with the 32-year-old Salt Lake City woman, she allegedly had collected merchandise including a Rolex watch and 11 leather jackets by using credit cards obtained in others' names.
Her crimes cost about a dozen victims more than just money.
A mother says she lost time with her three small children as she made countless phone calls to credit card companies trying to straighten out the mess caused by the unauthorized use of her name. After Gulla forged her name to a stolen check and changed the amount on it, a husband and wife spent more than $200 in bank fees and began going to the post office to mail letters.
"This does not include my time (about 20 hours, and still counting) to track down outstanding checks, talking to banks (mine and the one where she tried to cash the check), rearranging automatic deductions, talking to the sheriff and filling out appropriate paperwork," the wife wrote in a letter to the federal judge who sentenced Gulla last month to serve 57 months in prison and pay $54,452 in restitution.
The National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, defines identity theft as unauthorized use or attempted use of existing credit cards, unauthorized use or attempted use of other existing accounts such as checking accounts and misuse of personal information to obtain new accounts or loans or to commit other crimes. The state of Utah has set up the Identity Theft Reporting Information System to combat the problem. The system, touted as the first of its kind in the nation, will send identity theft complaints directly to the proper law enforcement agency and provide victims with a checklist of actions to resolve credit problems. The new system will make its debut Monday at an ID Theft Summit in Park City, which will be attended by attorneys general from 21 states.