RECIPE FOR SUCCESS:

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a three-part series on identity theft in Newport Beach.

In my last article I wrote how street gangs have graduated to identity theft to compromise myriad employees to sell your sensitive personal information. Addresses, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, mortgage information and credit card numbers make criminals millions of dollars a year.

Newport Beach remains the No. 1 city in the nation for these crimes. We now hold the title of being the U.S. “scam capital.” Newport Police Officer Eric Peterson put me in touch with an incarcerated former identity thief, a master criminal who now assists law enforcement. He explained steps we can take to become less attractive targets.

Use your laptop at the local coffee house? Criminals look over shoulders and capture e-mail addresses. They send you an e-mail with a familiar name or heading so you open the e-mail. What you don’t know is that mail contains a keystroke-tracking program that will infiltrate your computer and allow them to download your passwords and track Internet activity. Some of these programs mask themselves as GIF files and are not filtered by spyware programs.

 Get yourself a post office box.

  Have your street address removed from your driver’s license, checks, bank statement, utilities and credit card bills. Everything now goes to your PO Box.

 Stop paying bills or purchases by check.

 Pay bills via the Internet with a pre-paid credit card.

 Never use a debit card.

 Shred everything. Never throw anything away with your street address on it.

 Get encryption software installed in your laptop and home computer.

 Check your credit reports regularly, even for your children. Identity thieves change reports frequently and are stealing children’s Social Security numbers.

  Go in the post office to mail letters. Thieves devise tools with sticky materials to slip through mail boxes and fish out mail.

  Don’t waste money on fraud prevention websites. They only alert you after you’ve been victimized and by then it’s too late. Criminals use them to alert them when an identity they’re using has been compromised.

Visit the Newport Beach Police website www.nbpd.org for more tips.

Identity theft generates billions of dollars each year globally, the informant said. Crime syndicates worldwide fuel this through drugs, and drug money fuels terrorism.

But identity thieves are not the only ones who realize that Newport is ripe for the pickings. There is another breed of white collar criminal preying on the rich and want to be rich.

In my last article of this series I’ll take a look at investment and embezzlement scams plaguing Newport and how law enforcement is dealing with this fast-growing criminal element.

BARBARA VENEZIA is the chairman of the Santa Ana Heights Redevelopment Project Advisor Committee and was the co-creator of the cooking show “At Home on the Range” with John Crean.