By Brian Prince

SAN FRANCISCO—Early one morning several years ago, the police knocked on Robert Maynard’s door and told him he was under arrest for fraud. There was just one problem: The Robert Maynard the police were looking for did not actually exist.

Maynard was the victim of identity theft. Today, he is co-founder and chief operating officer of LifeLock, a company that works with credit bureaus to prevent the crime to which he fell victim. He was also one of four officials from the federal government and technology industry who sat on a panel at the RSA Conference here Feb. 7 at a town hall meeting on identity theft—a meeting marked with calls for stronger government regulation of ISPs and increased crackdowns on cyber-criminals.

It is a subject that is not going away. According to the Federal Trade Commission, in 2006 identity theft topped the list of consumer complaints filed with the agency for the seventh year in a row. The FTC received 246,035 complaints of identity theft last year, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,354 complaints it received.

To read more about online identity theft, click here.

Ira Winkler, president of the Internet Security Advisors Group and a former computer systems analyst with the National Security Agency, said there are three main ways criminals get their hands on stolen identities: low-tech activities like dumpster diving, data breaches at companies and “stupid” user mistakes online.  Read more.

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