PENNSYLVANIA Identity-theft fighter becomes victim

Mary Beth Buchanan violated her own rule: Don't give your card to the waiter.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan is now wearing two hats: chief prosecutor and victim of identity theft.
Investigators still don't know who swiped her credit-card number -- a process known as skimming -- when she was in San Francisco to speak to corporate attorneys about fraud last month. Buchanan lunched April 18 at a trendy Union Square restaurant, where U.S. Postal Inspectors think her Visa credit-card number was stolen.
Buchanan was alerted to suspicious activity on her credit-card while shopping the next day. A Visa representative advised her of a single suspicious $30 telephone order for some computer equipment in the hours between her lunch and the shopping stop.
"That's not unusual. They'll try to use the card for a small amount first, just to test the account to see if it's good," said Buchanan, who prosecuted credit-card cases before she was appointed to head the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania in September 2001.
Fortunate aspects
Postal Inspector Andrew Richards of Pittsburgh, who's working on the case with federal authorities in San Francisco, said Buchanan was lucky.
The identity thief -- at a minimum -- would have likely run up a large number of purchases in a short time. But an ambitious thief could have parlayed Buchanan's Visa information into bogus accounts in her name, Richards said. Instead, Buchanan caught on early and canceled the account.
Identity theft is growing at a staggering rate in the United States.
Nearly 215,000 complaints were tallied by a Federal Trade Commission database that logs information from law-enforcement agencies nationwide. The FTC counted 86,000 identity-theft complaints in 2001 and nearly 162,000 in 2002.
Identity theft has become the stuff of Americana. A series of commercials by Citibank that show identity-theft "victims" who speak using the voice of the person who stole their credit information has spawned dozens of kudos and spoofs in Internet chat rooms.
Telltale signs
Richards said credit-card companies painstakingly track the habits of identity thieves to create a behavior profile -- purchases of a certain amount, or at a certain time of the day -- to "red-flag" purchases. Investigators weren't certain why the $30 purchase on Buchanan's card prompted scrutiny.
"Credit-card companies, though competitive, work collaboratively with regard to fraud," Richards said. "Because if Visa's affected, it doesn't mean they're not going to try the same thing with a MasterCard."
Buchanan said she violated a cardinal rule that she's repeatedly warned about in identity-theft prevention talks to citizens groups.
"One of the things I tell people is, you don't have to give the card to your waiter or waitress -- you can take it to the counter yourself while the bill is processed," Buchanan said. "Short of keeping the card with you at all times, there's no way to prevent this from happening."