Ted Wern was in two different places at the same time one night in May 2000. He was in his apartment in Chicago, fresh out of law school and studying for the bar exam. He was also in Mansfield, Ohio, drunk on his ass and joyriding through the outskirts of town. The police pulled him over and discovered he was driving without a license, but he sweet-talked them into letting him drive home.
Many victims reach the point where they want to give up. But if they let their credit go to hell, their lives will soon follow. Bad credit, no matter how accumulated, can prevent people from getting something as basic as phone service. You want to mortgage a house or secure a loan to start a small business? No chance.
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Yet once you’re victimized, don’t expect much help from law enforcement. With 750,000 new identity thefts in the country each year, local police departments are overwhelmed. Their job is complicated by jurisdictional problems, as when someone who stole an identity in one state commits financial crimes in another. “Law enforcement doesn’t have the resources or the manpower to investigate every report,” says Rolando Berrelez, assistant director of the Federal Trade Commission’s midwest regional office, which maintains an identity-theft database. “In many cases the victims have to deal with the consequences on their own.”
Wern believes the thief had stolen mail from his family’s home in Columbus, Ohio. “He found my name, my social security number, and my date of birth,” he says. “Using that information, as well as a fake ID card, he departed on a crime and spending spree that was unimaginable to me at the time. I still can’t quite put it into perspective.”
He had gone to the police–after all, a crime had been committed. He’d also contacted the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Post Office mail-fraud bureau, and the Secret Service. But identity theft is a difficult crime to solve. “There’s no paper trail with identity theft,” says Wern. “It’s a telephone trail. It’s an Internet trail. And it’s just hard to track these people down.”
Eventually Wern realized that the only way to recover his identity was to stop the criminal. But he knew he couldn’t do that without help from the police.
The three-and-a-half-year ordeal had cost Wern 300 hours of work and $1,200 in expenses. Yet he says, “In some ways, having my identity stolen gave me opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise had.”
