KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - Going out midweek is never wise, but since my mini-binge with some friends newly arrived in town at an East Village joint called Nowhere the other day, I have had this queasy feeling the damage may have gone far beyond the next day's hangover. Actually, I may have blown it badly.
The depth of my fecklessness only struck me later when I caught the beginning of a film on television called Firewall with Harrison Ford.
My stomach knotted as the tidy life of his character began to unravel when he found he owed US$92,000 ($132,235) in gambling debts. He had never placed a bet in his life.
This was Hollywood's take on a new scourge that makes headlines daily - identity theft, when unsuspecting victims discover too late that crooks, often by means of internet skulduggery, have accessed all their personal records, bank account numbers and so forth, to weave unscrupulous scams.
Small-fry this isn't. According to the Government, the perpetrators of these crimes make off with about US$5 billion ($7 billion) a year.
Sometimes it can be as simple as using your credit card number to buy a Lincoln or Lexus but often the crimes are more elaborate.
Last week saw a man sentenced in New York to 15 years for stealing the identity of a nun, selling her house and acquiring several other properties in her name for which she was hit with a small fortune in unpaid taxes. Suddenly, the sister was seriously delinquent.
With disturbing regularity, we hear about large institutions mislaying the financial information of customers stored in their databases.
Several chain stores in Florida acknowledged recently that the credit card details of 17,000 customers had been hacked. Who knows what it may have done to their credit card balances, let alone their credit ratings. In the US, a poor credit rating can spell catastrophe.
All of which has served to make most of us super-vigilant about our financial privacy. We hunch over the Cashpoint machines for fear someone will make a note of our pin numbers and shred bank statements before putting them in the rubbish lest some ne'er-do-well plunder our account numbers.
And yet we are all capable of letting down our guard and this is how an innocent visit to Nowhere may, I sincerely fear, have turned into the night that I became Mr Nobody.
Four beers down, I was distracted by a young man inquiring if any of us would like a free cigarette lighter. All we needed to do in exchange was identify our favourite brand of cigarettes. Forgetting I had given up, I snatched the lighter and blurted the name of a large desert mammal with a hump on its back. He typed the name into a hand-held computer and said he needed a few more details - my telephone number, then my email account and finally he wanted a look at driving licence? Faster than you can say sucker, he had scanned the thing directly into his little gizmo.
It is possible, I suppose, that he was indeed just a market researcher. The licence, after all, reveals fairly innocuous information - my eye colour and gender as well as my date of birth, which these days I do prefer to keep secret. But it was while watching Ford on television the next day that I started to get the jitters. In my eagerness to acquire a lighter I will never use, had I handed this man my identity on a plate?
As of today, nothing seems amiss with my bank and credit accounts - pitiful, but not bad enough to prompt thoughts of suicide. But paranoia is a friend that takes its leave reluctantly and I can't help feeling that the man in the bar was a foot soldier for an identity theft ring readying to disembowel me financially.
It could get more complicated still. Sometimes an identity is stolen not just for financial gain but so it can be passed to others. The people who do this generally harvest dormant numbers from dead people, but not always.
Just before Christmas, federal immigration agents launched a brutal and unprecedented series of raids, arresting hundreds of illegal immigrants at meat packing plants in six different states. Most are now in jail, leaving distraught families on the outside unsure of their fates .
They are charged not with working without papers but with working with papers bearing social security numbers stolen from cadavers and, possibly, dupes like me.
My sympathies are firmly with foreigners trying to forge a decent life for themselves and their families in this country. Who else would do the back-breaking work at the knackers and in the fields? Yet I am uncertain about what consequences would follow if right now there is a strawberry picker in the fruit valleys of California, if not claiming my actual name, then wearing blue contact lenses and using my social security number.
I guess I will only find out the next time I leave the country and find myself drawn to one side at customs on my return. "Sorry , sir," the agent will say, "but you are no longer David Usborne. You are now nobody."
- INDEPENDENT
