AI Technologies to Defeat Identity Theft Vulnerabilities
Latanya Sweeney · 2005
When a large number of citizens are at risk to identity theft, national security and economic prosperity are threatened. This work shows that thousands of Americans are at such risk, and introduces technology, named “Identity Angel, ” to help. Identity Angel’s goal is to crawl through information available on the World Wide Web (“Web”) and notify people for whom information, freely available on the Web, can be combined sufficiently to impersonate them in financial or credentialing transactions. This is an ambitious goal due to the various types of available information and the many inferences that relate disparate pieces of data. Therefore, the work presented herein focuses specifically on acquiring information sufficient to fraudulently acquire a new credit card using on-line resumes. An imposter needs to learn the {name, Social Security Number, address, date of birth} of a subject. Results show how resumes containing needed information can automatically be found and values harvested, and how many subjects removed such information from the Web once notified. Incidents among younger adults were high. These adults are more likely to have resumes and facts about themselves posted on the World Wide Web (“Web”). They are also likely to have multiple residences in a short time period, making the issuance of a new credit card to a fraudulent address more difficult to determine. So, this work seeks to help this group by focusing specifically on the risk of new credit card fraud related to on-line resumes.