http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/technology/17IDEN.htm

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
May 17, 2002

Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in
recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports - a virtual
one-stop shop for fraud and identity theft - with data on consumers in
affluent neighborhoods across the country.

The company said in a letter to the victims that computer intruders
used an authorization code from Ford Credit to get the credit reports
from Experian, one of three major reporting agencies.

"I've never seen anything of this size," a spokesman for Experian,
Donald Girard, said. "Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're
extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust
factor."

The inquiries gave the intruders access to each victim's personal and
financial information, including address, Social Security number, bank
and credit card accounts and ratings of creditworthiness, which can be
used to identify the best targets.

"This is not just a credit card number; this is the whole kazoo," said
Richard Power, the editorial director for the Computer Security
Institute, an industry trade group. A criminal could use the data to
make credit card charges or even open bank and credit card accounts in
the victim's name.

Thefts of credit records, Mr. Power said, are far more common than is
reported. "The unique thing about this one," he said, "is that it has
surfaced." The theft was first reported yesterday by The Boston Globe
and The Detroit News.

Statistics on identity theft are hard to come by, with estimates
ranging as high as 700,000 cases a year. Betsy Broder, the assistant
director for planning and information of the Federal Trade Commission,
said the commission received 86,000 complaints of identity theft last
year.

Representatives of Ford Credit said they did not know how the hackers
acquired the code, which was used by the company's office in Grand
Rapids, Mich. The intruders focused on addresses in affluent
neighborhoods, often in numeric sequence, said Rich Van Leeuwen,
executive vice president at Ford Credit.

The company said it had sent letters via certified mail to all 13,000
people, urging them to contact Experian and the two other credit
reporting giants, Equifax and TransUnion, and to report any evidence
of abuse to the F.B.I.

The company has also worked with Experian to set up a phone line to
let victims get their credit reports and help them resolve
discrepancies.

Neither Ford Credit nor Experian has determined how many people have
reported fraudulent charges or other problems. Mr. Girard said that
Experian had received 2,700 calls since the letters started going out
this month. Although the unauthorized inquiries began in April 2001,
Ford first heard about the problem in February, Mr. Van Leeuwen said.
Only 400 of the 13,000 victims were customers of Ford Credit, he said.

Dawn M. Clenney, a special agent at the F.B.I. office in Detroit, said
that she could not comment, except to say, "We're on the case."

Mr. Girard, the Experian spokesman, said the company would work with
the F.B.I. to catch and prosecute the intruders. "It just shows that
today, even big companies can be victimized," he said. "it's a
never-ending struggle against the bad guys."

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