FTC opens all out assault on economic cyber-scammers

to spend over $10,000 to comply with the Red Flag Rule.

The FTC delay follows a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office last year that took issue with which Social Security Numbers and other personal identification is available in public records across the country. Among other things the study noted that 85% of large counties and 41% of small counties in the US make records that may contain SSNs generally available in bulk or online. On top of that, many record keepers do not or cannot restrict the types of entities that can obtain public records and may not know how records are being used. Finish that observation off with the notion that some businesses are sending records with SSNs offshore, primarily to India and the Philippines, even though not much is known about how such data are protected overseas.