Plain Text: Identity-Theft Caper

MSN's online bill-payment service was the canary in my identity-theft coal mine. It started its cautionary whistling last week with a series of four letters I received at home over four days. First, MSN was pleased that I had signed up for its bill-pay service. Then it expressed concern that the credit-card number I had given them wasn't valid. Finally, it told me it was suspending my account. We had moved from delight to disdain and divorce in less than a week; it felt like one of my old relationships.

But there was one little problem: I hadn't opened up any account with MSN. When I called to settle the matter, they told me someone was using my name and address. I was bemused but unconcerned.

Then the phone started to ring. Another bogus account had been opened up in my name at Chase bank. And one at Wells Fargo. And another at an online bill-pay service in Ireland.

Still, I wasn't overly worried. It seemed like a prank. I knew what precautions to take. I called the three major credit bureaus--Equifax, TransUnion and Experian--and put a fraud alert on my credit report. One shock: these three companies, which make millions charging us $10 a pop to see our own credit histories, don't even offer the courtesy of a human voice on the other end of the line. I ended up recording my personal data, the very stuff I was trying to protect, on a machine somewhere in voicemail hell.

For the bigger picture, I called my MSNBC.com colleague and identity-theft expert Bob Sullivan, the author of "Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic." One of the fake accounts opened in my name listed an address in Seattle, and Bob told me that much of the identity-theft crime concentrated in the Pacific Northwest was related to methamphetamine trafficking. I mentioned to him I wasn't too troubled by this saga. It wasn't going to cost me any money. Cleaning up the mess would take time; at worst, it would be a diversion from my ongoing investigation into the mysterious theft of my car.

Identity theft has been the fastest-growing crime in America for three years. Last year, there were 10 million victims, costing $53 billion in losses, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Some $48 billion of that was borne by the financial-services industry, which pledges to cover defrauded customers. They figure it's a cost of doing business in today's promiscuous but profitable credit environment, where Americans sign up for new credit cards everywhere from the baseball stadium to the meat aisle at the local supermarket. But I had always been careful with my personal information, ripping up receipts and encrypting my wireless Internet communications. What did I have to worry about?