Identity theft is a serious business. Everyone knows about how identity thieves can uses your identity to obtain credit and run up a bill that the consumer is ultimately responsible for. Everyone is aware of how an indemnity thief can open up a bank account in the consumer’s name, buy a car and do any number of things that can leave the poor consumer in the lurch. Identity thieves can file fraudulent medical claims and employ someone’s identity for any number of scams.
But what is seldom discussed is how an identity thief can apply for employment, using someone’s identity to avoid detection for past crimes and sexual offenses. The identity thief can essentially pose as someone else and work for as long as he likes. This may not be happening in a big way now, but as the recent article in the Los Angeles Times attest, identity theft is always in transition, constantly morphing into new and increasingly virulent forms. There are indications the new form may include employment applications.
A convicted felon or sex offender applying for a job may want to enter the workplace under a different name and social security number. His largest concern is hardly his future social security benefits but finding gainful employment. You job applicant may be a wanted for crimes in other states and staying a step ahead of the law. Still, chances are he needs to find work.
It is important to conduct the Social Security Trace as part of the background checks you run on all your job applicants. Once you run the Social Security Trace, you may see additional names appear on the background report. Some of those names may be natural permutations as people change and abbreviate their names. In the case of female job applicants, you may see their married or maiden names. With younger people, their parents’ names could appear or others with whom they are sharing apartments or some credit. Social Security Traces largely come off of credit headers as well as other public information.
But then you see the case where your employment applicant applied on one name, but other names show up on his Social Security Trace. This can prove suspicious. Who are these people? Sometimes they are undocumented workers using your candidate name to pose as legitimate workers. But sometimes the background checking results will indicate that the social security number in fact belongs to another person.
Of course, if your identity thief may try to beat your background check by is applying for employment under the name of the person from whom he stole his new identity. Criminal records background checks may not help you as the actual owner of that identity may be pure as the driven snow. But that’s where education verification and employment verificaitons come in handy. Chances are your identity thief would be employee has no knowledge of the actual person’s past history with regard to previous employment or education.
In the end this may not be a serious problem for most employers at the moment. But in the future this kind of identity theft may yet be one more thing to consider.
Check them out before you hire.
