[damasa]

I work at a bank so I am dealing with Identity Theft all of the time. In the last year or so it has become a very big "business" for some criminals. It has become increasingly bad in the Southeastern Wisconsin/Northeastern Illinois area.

There are severe punishments for people who are convicted ofIdentity Theft but the problem is that some of these people are really really good at it, therefore really really hard to catch.

The other problem is that most people do not acquire someone's information from a lost purse/wallet or something like that. These criminals are using the internet and other Hi-Tech means. We are talking top notch computer equipment and printing equpiment.

To give you an example of how "sophisticated" these criminals have become, a man was caught in Milwaukee just a few weeks ago with an ATM "Scanner." It is a device that he could swipe or feed into an atm machine and somehow access the most previously used numbers. He could then use the device to act like a card and take money from those accounts he accessed. I always make to cancel out of my transactions twice now when I'm using an ATM machine.