Released: February 09, 2006

Worse than ID theft…Hey, that ain’t me!

Source: By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com

Julie Hernandez had no idea she was a convicted shoplifter. Then, three days before she was supposed to start a new job as an executive assistant at a Fortune 500 food company, Hernandez got a call from her employer-to-be.

“They advised me they were not going to move forward with the hiring process due to the result of a background check,” said the 38-year-old Chicago-area resident. “I was like ‘what is this?’”

So Hernandez got a hold of the company that did the check, got the case number of the crime she had supposedly committed and went to the county court.

Sure enough, Hernandez said the woman on the case number had a different name, different birthday, different social security number. She says she’s fallen victim to one of the fastest growing areas personal information trouble - mistaken identity.

“We’re getting an increasing amount of questions about background checks, almost as many as identity fraud,” said Tena Friery, research director for Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a California-based consumer education organization. “There are too many problems with inaccurate information being recorded.”

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