Identity Theft

Rebecca Bowman of the Howard County Office of Consumer Affairs will give a presentation on identity theft and how to protect yourself, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Ellicott City Senior Center, 9401 Frederick Road. Call 410-740-4276 for more information.

Aberdeen Forshaye Deshawn, 21, of the 100 block of Holloway Road, was charged Monday with being a fugitive from Virginia. Shona L. Murray, 42, of the 4900 block of Villa Point Drive, was charged Monday with failing to appear in court for a case in which she was charged with second-degree assault, violating a protective order and theft less than $100. Aberdeen police report: A theft was reported Tuesday in the 200 block of Angus Drive. Multiple shots were fired Tuesday in the 900 block of Edmund Street.

If you throw away documents with personal information on them, those papers could be stolen and eventually, so can your identity. That's why identity theft experts suggest that consumers shred papers with sensitive information, such as bank account numbers or Social Security numbers. But not everyone has a shredder. For those without one, the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Maryland and Delaware is holding a free “shred-it” event from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20th, at Towson University's No. 11 parking lot. That's above the University Union Parking Garage off Osler Drive.

A federal judge on Monday sentenced a Baltimore County man to 11 years in prison and ordered him to pay close to $200,000 in restitution to victims of a wire fraud and identity theft scheme that victimized Johns Hopkins doctors, among some 250 others, the U.S. Justice Department said. Derrick Hill, 53, of Woodlawn, previously pleaded guilty to the charges, along with co-conspirators Renee Cabell, 51, John Coffey, 43, and Tawney King, 46. Authorities said Hill and the other defendants stole identities, then cashed counterfeit checks and rented apartments in the names of victims.

The IRS wants to show taxpayers it is taking identity theft seriously. Today, the agency announced it conducted a 32-state sweep in recent weeks that targeted 389 identity theft suspects and led to 734 enforcement actions - from complaints to indictments and arrests - in January. It had help from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys' offices. The IRS posted a map of its crackdown, which includes several cases in Maryland. According to the IRS, this includes an indictment in January of two brothers who allegedly filed fake returns from April 2007 to January 2012, collecting refunds ranging from about $1,500 to $4,950.

Baltimore police are investigating a security breach at Mercy Medical Center that left an undisclosed number of patient records open to possible identity theft, according to the Maryland attorney general's office. The hospital's vice president for corporate compliance sent a letter to the affected former patients on Monday, saying that a former employee might have gained access to patient records in order to apply for credit cards and loans. A spokesman for the attorney general's office said he was unsure how many patients received letters.

Beware of outside websites claiming they want to help you file for unemployment benefits. The Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing & Regulation's unemployment insurance division warns these sites can collect personal information about you and possibly leave you open to identity theft. The state named one of the sites, Unemployment Help Center, in a press release. The only way to apply for unemployment benefits, the state says, is directly through the state's unemployment insurance division's website or by calling its office at 410-949-0022 or 800-827-4839.

An obscure provision of a federal law created to prevent identity theft has come under the spotlight in Baltimore, where a man has sued three area bars for violating the law's intent. In three lawsuits filed last week in Baltimore's U.S. District Court, Ronald L. Bradley of Baltimore County contends that three bars - Kooper's Tavern in Fells Point, Poncabird Pub in East Baltimore and the Middle River bar and restaurant Catches - printed the expiration date of his credit card in sales receipts.

A state business group has invited members of the public to bring their sensitive documents Saturday to "Shred Day" identity theft prevention events in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties. The events, hosted by the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland, will send trucks to Arundel Mills (behind hhgregg) and The Avenue in White Marsh (behind the AMC Lowes), and will accept documents until noon. Each truck is capable of shredding up to 8,000 pounds of personal information.

A routine traffic stop by a police officer in Georgia led authorities in Maryland to a suspected identity theft scheme in which state unemployment benefits totaling $170,000 were falsely obtained in the names of dozens of unwitting people. None of the people for whom the benefits were paid out was unemployed, and none knew that someone had applied for the money using their identities, according to federal law enforcement officials assigned to a financial crime task force. The Maryland U.S. attorney's office announced indictments Thursday charging Vivek Jain, 25, of Gaithersburg and Amiee Arora, 31, of Washington with aggravated identity theft and mail fraud.

Dr. Joshua Zimmerberg says he's careful not to publicly disclose any personal information that could be of use to identity thieves. But soon, he might not have any choice but to have his finances published on the Internet for the world to see. Zimmerberg, a researcher and manager at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, is one of 28,000 federal employees in the executive branch who come under last year's Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge...

A Senate committee has killed a Republican-sponsored bill to shield from public scrutiny the names and personal information of people who sign petitions to bring General Assembly-passed bills to referendum. The Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee voted 8-3 along party lines Tuesday night to kill the bill sponsored by Sen. Nancy Jacobs of Harford County. Proponents of the bill said petitions should be exempt from public records laws to protect the privacy of voters.

The IRS wants to show taxpayers it is taking identity theft seriously. Today, the agency announced it conducted a 32-state sweep in recent weeks that targeted 389 identity theft suspects and led to 734 enforcement actions - from complaints to indictments and arrests - in January. It had help from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys' offices. The IRS posted a map of its crackdown, which includes several cases in Maryland. According to the IRS, this includes an indictment in January of two brothers who allegedly filed fake returns from April 2007 to January 2012, collecting refunds ranging from about $1,500 to $4,950.

As of New Year's Day, arsenic is officially off the menu for Maryland chickens. The nation's first statewide ban on the use of additives in chicken feed containing the toxic metal is among a dozen new state laws that take effect Jan. 1. The new civil marriage measure that was affirmed by Maryland voters in November, allowing same-sex couples to take their vows, has grabbed the most headlines, but less-publicized laws will take effect as well....

A 48-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced to five years in prison for fraudulently claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in unemployment benefits from the state using false identities, a scheme he conducted in part while already behind bars on unrelated charges, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Kevin Bernard Smith, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit access device fraud and aggravated identity theft, will also have to serve three years of supervised release, prosecutors said.

A Woodlawn man and his girlfriend have pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft charges in a federal case that compromised the personal information of more than 250 people - including doctors who applied for fellowships at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where the girlfriend worked. Derrick Hill, 52, was the "ringleader" of a group of four people - including his girlfriend, Renee Cabell, 51, and co-defendants John Coffey and Tawney King, who have also pleaded guilty - that stole more than $188,000 in cash, merchandise and services through their scheme between August and October 2009, according to a statement from the Maryland U.S. State's Attorney's Office.

By now, we've all heard about identity theft. But some of us are more vulnerable to the crime than others. Of those age 18 and older, people ages 25 to 34 are the most at risk of having personal information compromised, according to Javelin Strategy and Research's 2006 Identity Fraud Survey.. Although previous studies have identified this phenomenon, Javelin's is one of the largest ID theft surveys to date. Why are young adults more at risk? Javelin reasons that a mobile lifestyle creates more opportunity for identity theft.

If you throw away documents with personal information on them, those papers could be stolen and eventually, so can your identity. That's why identity theft experts suggest that consumers shred papers with sensitive information, such as bank account numbers or Social Security numbers. But not everyone has a shredder. For those without one, the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Maryland and Delaware is holding a free “shred-it” event from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20th, at Towson University's No. 11 parking lot. That's above the University Union Parking Garage off Osler Drive.

Tom Morgan tried to file his federal tax return electronically this year, but he kept getting an error message that advised him to double-check his Social Security number. Morgan thought the problem was a transposed digit or some minor glitch on the IRS' end, something he has experienced before. "It was a very generic error message," he says. "No urgency, no 'You're in big trouble now.'" Morgan says he didn't know until reading my column a couple of weeks ago that taxpayers receive this message after a thief has used their identity to file a bogus tax return and collect a refund.