Victim of identity theft?

[stephenb (Stephen)]

My case is not as severe as some I have heard of, and does not involved very personal information, but I have had previous internet usernames which someone has obviously 'hacked' into and used those usernames to create forum accounts, edit Wikipedia, join Yahoo groups etc (hence why my IIS username has changed). Apparently my user name joined up forums on subjects I've never been to on the internet (car and hotrod forums, boat forums, gaming and computer forums). Then they just cause troudle on these forums "flaming" is that the term??

Has anyone been the victim of identity theft in the internet?

[Alchemy (Clive)]

not that im aware of...... i dont look around that much so who knows.
how did you find you had been "cloned" elsewhere ?

[Baddad (Marty)]

Hi Stephen,

No, not me either. I assume it goes on. Malicious vandalism, boil 'em in oil.

Cheers Marty

[AdrianF (Adrian)]

Yes I have had my identity "stolen" while at uni. Emails from my acct was sent to the Dean of Engineering and most of the Lecturers. I was called into the Deans office to "please explain" when a series of emails was sent to the Dean. An ivestigation was started and all the IT people could find was the emails was coming off site from another Uni I was in CQU and the emails where coming from USQ. They stopped not long after.

Adrian
PS at the time it was very embarrassing.

[Kal (Andrew)]

By 'previous internet usernames' do you mean 'old email addresses' ? Email addresses are used to create the things you listed such as forum accounts, edit Wikipedia, join Yahoo groups etc.

If they are email addresses from old ISP's, I wonder if they can be recycled once you terminate your contract and another user signs up? I mean, if my name was common, such as John Smith, and I formerly had John.Smith@telstra.com, would another John Smith be able to take my old address if I switched ISP?

I guess for all important accounts that you sign up with email, it is important to update your details when switching ISP.

[stephenb (Stephen)]

mean internet usernames. about early last year I started receiving "Reply to thread" messages into my email account from forums I have never visited or have not interest in the topic. When I investigated it further, my usernames I have been using for years have signed up to the weird forums and yahoo groups. So somehow my email address must have been comprimised for the registration process to be successful. I went looking at these sites and found that even lines from my signatures from IIS were used in the fraudulant signatures. I was a regular Wiki editor until about 8 months ago, but my edits mysteriously continued under my username. I have spent many months changing my email addresses, ISP's, usernames, and emailing the admin's and mods of these forums to advise them. Most complied and were very good, and only in the last month has it all stopped. Unless of course, "they" are watching me now?

And from my experience with BigPond, anything is possible. I rang up to inquire about our broadband a few months ago and the operator told me my ADSL was working "okay at their end" then told me my service address was in far north Qld??? We were payingfor someone elses account. So my question was "who was paying for ours????"

I guess in this day and age information is easily accessed and gained, if you know how.

[Kal (Andrew)]

That sounds alot worse than what I envisioned.

If you have some co-operation from the forums where these fraudulent accounts are being used you can try to get the forum administrator to supply you with the IP address of the poster. You will be able to work out at minimum the ISP of the fraudulent poster, and perhaps you could take it up further with the ISP. Hopefully if things have died down, you won't need to take any more action though.

[Jules76 (Julian)]

Originally Posted by Kal

If they are email addresses from old ISP's, I wonder if they can be recycled once you terminate your contract and another user signs up? I mean, if my name was common, such as John Smith, and I formerly had John.Smith@telstra.com, would another John Smith be able to take my old address if I switched ISP?

When I was with TPG, I was told that once an email address is taken, it can no longer be used again once the contract is terminated. Not even by the same person if they switched ISP's then came back again (which is what I did). I assume it's the same for all ISP's and it does make sense for personal and security reasons.

[stephenb (Stephen)]

Originally Posted by Jules76

When I was with TPG, I was told that once an email address is taken, it can no longer be used again once the contract is terminated. Not even by the same person if they switched ISP's then came back again (which is what I did). I assume it's the same for all ISP's and it does make sense for personal and security reasons.

I would hope that is true across the board, Jules.

A few years ago someone from Denmark hacked into my eBay account and started selling excavation equipment (bobcats, large drilling rigs, graders etc.) using my eBay user name. Through my IT people at work I was able to trace it to an internet cafe in Vancouver. There the trail went cold.

I did listen to an interesting Radio National report in 2007 on Background Briefing about internet security and one of the comments was that the US Govt. homeland security/CIA/FBI have basically given up on trying to maintain any level of security on the web. That is why there is such a big push from banks in the last few years to educate their customers to be more vigilant on the internet (or as some insiders claim, this pushes any blame back onto the customer if anything goes wrong. That is the bank's real hidden motive.

I have located the RN Background Briefing report to download for anyone interested.... http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=9...4e75f6e8ebb871

Warning - it is 22Mb