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Thu, 28 Apr 2005

Fight fraud not ID theft

A very interesting point:

Schneier said that rather than focusing on making identity harder to steal it makes more sense to make information harder to use for criminal purposes. "The industry is going the wrong way in the US by worrying about keeping identity details secret. The focus should be on fraud. European countries, such as Holland [The Netherlands], are doing better than the US," he said.

There are some steps being taken in this direction, but overall the focus here has been on "identity theft" - which is the precursor to fraud in many cases, rather than on the fraud itself. Of course, identity theft is literally impossible to detect, until it's been used to commit fraud, so why is is all of the buzz about identity theft, and not the frauds it enables?

ID theft is a misnomer which is hurting the fight against fraud, according to encryption guru Bruce Schneier. Instead of talking about ID theft it's better to talk about fraud due to impersonation, he claimed.

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