The DataBased You

Hello and welcome to The DataBased You. My name is Jeffrey Omtvedt and I am a Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialist and co-author of If You Are Me, Then Who Am I. The goal of this blog is to educate our community on what The DataBased You is, how it relates to Identity Theft and to educate you on what Identity Theft truly is.  In order to accomplish this, I need to first introduce the real you to The DataBased You.

The DataBased You is the sum total of all the information about you, whether on paper or stored electronically, that can build a better biography of you than you could of yourself.  We are moving to a point in our society where the you you look at in the mirror everyday is not going to be as important as what the DataBased You has to say. In many ways, it already takes place today.

For instance ...

You could have a great job, pay your taxes, have a clean record and all around be a good person, but if you apply for a loan and your credit score does not match the financial institutions criteria, then chances are you are not getting the loan. What happened???

The DataBased You has biography of your credit history and that lender looked at a piece of The DataBased You to make a decision about the real you. 

Take a look at this image

What does this image say to you? What do you think of when you see it?

This is a graphical representation of just some of the information bought, sold, and traded ABOUT YOU, on a daily basis. There is billions of dollars being made on this information. That's right, there is billions of dollars being made on The DataBased You.

The scary news is, not only can this information be inaccurate, Identity thieves are incresingly finding that getting access to The DataBased You can help commit fraud.  When it comes to Identity Theft, forget what you've seen on TV and the majority of what you have read because most pundits and reporters only cover one fifth of the problem, the financial side. To understand Identity Theft, you must first realize there are Five Major Types and this is what we will cover in our next post.

Jeffrey Omtvedt

(John Gardner and Jim McCartney contributed to this post.)