AUSTRALIA’S largest credit reporting bureau, Veda Advantage, is devising ways to tackle the growing cost of identity theft
Veda head of consumer risk Angus Luffman said the company was developing an alert service that would send an SMS message to an individual if there had been any activity on their credit file. Mr Luffman said the SMS system would be rolled out in next 12 to 18 months. Veda has an existing email-based equivalent that has approximately 63,000 subscribers, who pay about $47 a year for their credit files to be monitored.
The cost of identity theft tops $3 billion annually and is expected to grow as social networking sites such as Facebook are increasingly used to obtain personal data. The recent hacking of the Sony PlayStation Network, which affected more than 77 million users worldwide, won’t be the last security breach involving the theft of personal information.
