By Richard M. Barron
STAFF WRITER
North Carolina's attorney general wants to make it easier for veterans to protect themselves against potential identity theft.
Roy
Cooper has asked the legislature to change state law to make it free
for veterans to place a security freeze on their credit reports, days
after the Department of Veterans Affairs said millions of its records
were stolen.
It
now costs $10 per credit agency to put a freeze on reports, which
essentially places a padlock on an account. It costs another $10 to
release information from an account, which could amount to $60 for
accounts at all three credit bureaus.
"I
don't think that the veterans should have to pay for any errors that
have occurred over which they have no control," said William F. Black,
a retired Greensboro banker who served in the Navy during the Korean
War era. "I think that's a penalty that they should never have to pay.
It's punitive and it's not their fault."
The
VA said Monday that the personal records of 26.5 million veterans were
stolen from the home of a VA employee. The 2000 Census said that about
120,000 veterans live in the Triad.
Rob
Thompson, a consumer advocate with the N.C. Public Interest Research
Group, said the legislation has sponsors in the House and Senate and
could be voted on within days.
North
Carolina is one of 13 states that allow residents to freeze their
credit accounts at the three major credit bureaus, Thompson said.
Victims
of identity theft have free use of the service, but a fee applies to
anybody who uses the service as prevention, such as when a wallet is
stolen.
Now that millions of veterans are vulnerable, Cooper said they should all act quickly to freeze their credit.
Even $30 could be a hardship, though.
"Some of them are living on moderate incomes," said Black. "They've given enough they don't have to have it piled on them."
Brian
Sowers, a Marine Corps veteran in Greensboro whose son is a Marine
fighting in Iraq, said, "if a government entity screwed it up in the
first place, it would seem silly to pay to kind of get out of jail."
Here's
how freezing credit works: The owner of the accounts gets a personal
identity number that prohibits anybody but the owner from getting
access to credit accounts.
"It's like putting a virtual master lock on your identity," Thompson said.
Thompson
said that because the data could be lost for years, veterans could rack
up hundreds of dollars in fees if they have to pay every time they lock
and unlock accounts to release information.
"It adds up," he said.
Still, Black and other veterans are uneasy about the situation.
"It
concerns me that any private information is available to someone that
might be able to use it to their advantage to benefit illegally," Black
said.
But Sowers said identity theft is always a worry and the latest threat is just one of many.
"God
only knows what's going on out there that we don't know about. It
obviously gets your attention that we're all vulnerable," he said, "but
I'm not going to start losing any more sleep than I did last night over
it."
