Alert the tourist bureau. Identity thieves don’t seem to like our town.
According to a recent study by the Identity Theft Resource Center and pen maker Uni-ball, Milwaukee ranked 42nd among 50 U.S. cities in per capita identity theft complaints – far behind Phoenix (first), Los Angeles (eighth) New York (22nd) and Chicago (24th).
According to the Federal Trade Commission, there were 1,066 identity theft complaints in the Milwaukee metro area in 2006, just 70.3 per 100,000 people. By comparison, Phoenix racked up 175.8, and there were 95.7 in Chicago.
Mari J. Frank, a leading privacy expert and author of Safeguard Your Identity, says the most vulnerable people for identity theft are those ages 18 to 29, since they are most eagerly trying to establish credit. Hmm. Maybe the state’s supposed brain drain of college graduates leads to less identify theft.
The crime is also connected to drug use. “Methamphetamines and ID theft go together like horse and carriage,” Frank says. But according to the Department of Justice, “The State Crime Lab has seen a reduction of approximately 60 percent in the number of [meth] cases submitted from 2005 to 2006 [and] the number of meth labs in Wisconsin has declined by 76 percent since 2003.”
Perhaps most important are state laws that better protect privacy. Frank says Wisconsin is one of a handful of states with a shredding statute, requiring companies to destroy sensitive information prior to discarding it. Wisconsin was also one of the first states (in 1997) to enact a criminal identity theft statute, and in April of last year, it became the second state to establish an Office of Privacy Protection.
“[These laws] increase people’s awareness about identity theft and allow law enforcement a more favorable legal landscape than in other states,” says Kevin St. John, public information officer for the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
