In the past month around 1,300 employees of Swift & Company were detained during immigrations raids in Iowa, Nebraska, texas, Utah, Minnesota and Colorado.
As many as 220 of those detained face identity theft charges.
The impact here in Iowa was significant, and sad. 89 of the 1,300 were detained in Marshalltown, Iowa, and more from other locations throughout the state. At least 30 of those who have been indicted with identity theft come from this area.
“The indictments accuse the immigrants of using falsely obtained state identification cards from Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas to obtain jobs at the Swift plant in Marshalltown.”
Yes, a sad situation; many of those who are being detained, and some subsequently exported, leave behind their very young children, many babies.
What you wonder is, where did they get the information to commit identity theft? Most, if not all, came to the U.S. specifically because of promises of a good job from Swift, and a better life for their families. Investigations are going on, but it seems suspicious that so many employees for the same company, from outside the U.S., would have obtained U.S. citizens’ personally identifiable information (PII) and subsequently assumed their identities on their own.
Most people think identity “theft,” really often identity fraud, is related to just credit card use. However, as this incident demonstrates, and other incidents, such as medical identity fraud that I have blogged about before demonstrate, identity theft and fraud can occur in many different ways and impact a very wide range of individuals, as well as businesses, also in many different ways.
Not only do those whose identities have been stolen pay substantial prices in trying to correct and repair their credit reports and other relevant records, but the families of those, such as illegal immigrants, also pay, such as the young children and babies of the workers who were lured to work within the U.S. by using the identities of others.
Tags: awareness and training, government, identity fraud, identity theft, Information Security, IT compliance, privacy, Swift