Perhaps the most startling statistic to come out of the meeting is that 50 percent of the ID thefts are accomplished offline.
Mailboxes are major sources of information for crooks, including the outgoing checks stolen from them, said Sean McCleskey, an executive at the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin.
McCleskey said a growing tactic of the thieves is to combine real information with false information to create new identities.
It’s called “synthetic identity,” in which a fraudster uses, for instance, a fake date of birth but a real Social Security number to obtain a fraudulent credit card.
Mixing real with fake information can make it harder for individuals, financial institutions and government units to discover the fraud.
He noted half of the Social Security numbers in synthetic identify theft belong to children.
But it’s hard to reduce the thefts, said McCleskey, because too many companies are willing to accept the losses as a cost of doing business.