When Lorraine Machado thought she was the only one, she was frightened. When she realized she was just one victim in a cluster of schoolteachers whose identities had been stolen, she became mad.
Now the soft-spoken teacher at Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles has mobilized the dozen colleagues who also have been victimized. They are pushing law enforcement to consolidate its cases and pursue the perpetrators. Machado also is urging credit grantors to investigate--not just to clear her name, but to find the crooks who stole it.
Fraud "clusters" such as the one that has hooked Machado and her friends, once considered rare, are cropping up with increasing frequency, experts say.
"We have found that there are many instances where whole groups of people will be victimized," said Betsy Broder, assistant director for planning and information at the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection in Washington. "That's usually because it's an inside job."
Though the FTC started an ID-theft consumer hotline and research Web site late last year, it's still too early to get solid statistics on how many people are hit by identity fraud each year and how many of those victims are part of fraud clusters. But anecdotal evidence of these fraud clusters abounds.
For instance, 80 to 100 California scientists were victimized after a pharmaceutical firm acquired their company and they were laid off. Several executives at General Motors got hit when a temporary employee sold their personnel records. Clerks at a national department store recently complained that they were all getting harassing phone calls from collection agents, one of the first indications of an identity fraud cluster, according to Mari J. Frank, an attorney and author of "The Identity Theft Survival Kit" (Porpoise Press, 1998).
It happened much the same way at Webster Middle School, said Cliff Burems, a physical education teacher. When bill collectors started calling him at school, he complained to a colleague. Machado overheard him, and things began to click. She had already compared notes with another teacher, Mary Barton, who was trying to clear fraudulent items from her credit report. They began to ask around and encourage other teachers to check their credit records.
One by one, they came forward. There was Susie Besone, another P.E. teacher; Lynda Davidson in the library; the bilingual coordinator, Victoria Sussman; and Bud Gold, who teaches English and social studies.
