Money TOD: The Nearly-Secret Source Of ID Theft Assistance
No one can dispute that The Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC), intended to be a one-stop service for those who have been vicitimized by ID theft, is a good idea:
The Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC) is a one-year pilot intended to test a cooperative industry process for helping victims of identity theft by streamlining the recovery process…..Fifty (Financial Services Roundtable) Members are participating and funding the ITAC pilot as a commitment to their customers and to maintain trust in the nation’s financial services system. The financial services industry recognizes that identity theft is a crime of enormous human and economic consequences.
From reading ITAC’s FAQ Page, if an account associated with the ID theft happens to be with any of the participating institutions, frontline people from that institution are supposed to put them in touch with ITAC, which after a screening process determines what help is needed. Then ITAC is supposed to help with all of the credit bureau fraud alerts, police reports, and myriad other notifications and documents that are necessary to protect the victim. It appears that if you get help from ITAC, the assistance and hassle reduction are indeed very valuable.
Sounds good. Anyone who has ever been through an identity theft would immediately recognize the advantages of having ITAC as the “single point of contact” and “only (having) to tell their story once” (quotes are from ITAC).
The only trouble is that the frontline or branch people I spoke to at four of the participating financial institutions had NO idea what ITAC is until I told them, and therefore would be of no help to an ID theft victim unless the victim knew about ITAC already, AND insisted on being referred to them.
Three voice messages in the past two days to ITAC have gone unreturned (in fairness, call #1 was yesterday morning). I am e-mailing them a reference to this blogpost to ensure they have an opportunity to respond to my concerns about their lack of visibility, and will update this post if/when they do. (DONE: see UPDATE 2 below)
I’m concluding that, with rare exception, the only identity theft victims who will ever know about ITAC are the few people who might stumble onto ITAC’s web site, people who read this post, or people who tell others about this post.
So…now that YOU know, please tell others about ITAC, and DEMAND to be referred to ITAC if you are a victim and have an account at one of the institutions participating in the pilot project (the list is HERE).
UPDATE:
On a humorous note, Wizbang suggests a “legally interesting” response to ID theft that I personally would not recommend.
UPDATE 2:
An ITAC person called back on Wednesday afternoon, and acknowledged that many frontline people at institutions participating in the pilot may very well not be aware of ITAC. She thought my recommendation that affected consumers should insist on help was a good one. She relayed to me that people who are referred to ITAC are very satisfied with the help they are getting, and I have no reason to doubt that. I should also note that once a bank’s Security department is aware of the ID theft, it is possible that the Security people may be aware of ITAC and complete the referral process. That is impossible to determine, but again the fact that readers of this blog now know of ITAC gives them a better chance of getting to ITAC’s services.
