How You Can Help
Call your representative and ask him to protect New Jersey’s identity theft protections, and oppose HR 3997. You can find your representative at this website. Once you know who your representative is, call him using this number: (202) 224-3121. It’s the capitol switchboard; ask for your representative and they will connect you.

Background
Identity theft is a terrible and growing problem, largely because your personal information is a hot commodity. If companies who gather, share and sell your data jealously guarded it, perhaps their activities would be harmless. As business practices now stand, however, you are constantly at risk of easily preventable identity theft.

Identity theft comes in many forms. One of the most painful types of financial identity theft is new account fraud, when the thief opens a new account—a credit card, a car loan, a mortgage—in your name, makes no payments, and destroys your credit, usually without you knowing until the creditor comes to collect. A more common type of identity theft is existing account fraud, when thieves steal from your bank account or go shopping with your existing credit cards. Thankfully, New Jerseyans are no longer completely exposed to these threats.

Last Spring, NJ unanimously enacted the comprehensive Identity Theft Prevention Act. Although identity theft, like all crime, cannot be completely "solved", new account fraud can be prevented and existing account fraud can be minimized. The Identity Theft Protection Act works to minimize existing account fraud by changing how business is done, and gives you the security freeze so you can prevent new account fraud from happening to you. Click here to learn more about the security freeze.

Now, Congress is considering HR 3997, which destroys much of New Jersey’s Identity Theft Prevention Act. First, it would take the security freeze right away from millions of New Jerseyans by limiting it to identity theft victims only. While many too many New Jerseyans are identity theft victims—using FTC data we estimate over 200,000 New Jerseyans were victimized in 2004 alone—several million New Jerseyans have not yet been victimized. HR 3997 would take the security freeze’s protection from them.

Second, HR 3997 would change the information security rules to make it much less likely that New Jerseyans will be told when their personal information has been jeopardized. HR 3997 puts the companies that mishandled the personal information in charge of deciding whether consumers should be told, and gives the companies broad discretion to decide no one should be told. That’s in stark contrast to New Jersey’s law, which requires companies to tell consumers unless there’s no reasonable possibility the information will be misused.

Third, HR 3997 prevents New Jersey from protecting its people. Not only does it forbid New Jersey’s Attorney General or New Jerseyans from trying to enforce the new rules—only federal agencies can enforce them—but it also prevents the Legislature from passing additional protections in the future.

In addition to the Security Freeze, there are a few other steps you can take to protect yourself from identity theft.