The need for a national identity
Dec 30th, 2007 by Jesper Kråkhede
In a swedish newspaper a police has vented his thoughts regarding the easy way to commit identity fraud in sweden. The fraud was commited in a very simple way. A person had registered a mobile phone number in another persons name and then applied for SMS-loans that should be transfered to any bank account. The bill sooner or later hits the persons registered on the mobile contract a week later or so.
The main issue is that the companies giving out loans do not check for the identity in such a way as they should. It is way to easy to get such a lone and the identity check is very rudimentary. In sweden we have a rather low rate of identity theft due to easienss for companies to actually check the identity of a person. Today sadly the identity of a person is not owned by local tax authorities as in many other contries but by the banks. By this I mean that the electronic ID is created and distributed by the banks creating several different standards with different security demands. Part from using for the bank business it is also used for handling identiy realtaed issues like applying for paternity leave and report that you have moved.
A central solutions could both set specific demands on waittimes for SMS-loans as it could check the actual identity of a person to a much higher degree. Identity fraud is a fact for manu people around the world and when it becames harder for a person to hide on internet identity theft will increase and frame other people instead. “When you cannot hide push someone else in front of you.”