By Ken Clark

Pity the bank robber of yesteryear. When they were robbing banks for a living, the only tools they had were guns and bravado, and since they had to be physically present to commit their crimes, they ran the constant risk of winding up carrying away more lead than gold. Not only that, but they had to settle for robbing just one bank at a time.

Today’s bank robber can pull off a dozen heists at the same time, and he can hit banks in New York, Chicago or Stroudsburg from as far away as Manila, Singapore or Katmandu, simply by stealing your identity and using your good name and credit rating instead of a gun. In today’s cyber world, it’s called identity theft. These criminals increasingly target financial institutions and big Internet merchandisers, and all a perpetrator needs is a computer.

Debra DeFrank, security officer at ESSA Bank in Stroudsburg, said identity theft is now the fastest growing crime in America. Last year, more than 9.9 million people were victimized.

“More than $48 billion was lost in the past year by financial institutions and businesses. Individuals lost an estimated $5 billion,” she said in a presentation on the problem.

“Identity theft appears to continue to increase,” she said. “It affects all banks. I think some of the larger banks are more affected by it because of the type of products they offer. A large amount of identity theft is done with credit cards and the large companies that offer credit cards are targeted because they offer those products.”

Brian Goerke of PNC Financial Services Group said that in 2004, the American banking industry lost $546 million to debit card fraud alone.

“Included in that was about $200 million in signature and PIN purchases and $345 million in ATM transactions,” he said, adding that while a successful scam may cost the individual victim months of grief to repair a damaged credit rating, it is the bank, not the customer, ultimately taking the financial hit.

“Customers are never responsible for unauthorized transactions or fees related to fraud,” he said. “I think that’s an important point to convey to customers.”

Both ESSA and PNC have branch banks with their own secret defensive computer programs throughout the four counties of the Poconos. But just because most of them are small compared to credit card-issuing giants like CitiBank and Chase Manhattan, Tom Brown, Vice President of Financial Services Solutions at LexisNexis, said they still are vulnerable to the wily thief with a heart full of larceny and a computer full of con game capabilities.

In fact, according to Brown, small town banks can be even more vulnerable to attack by identity thieves than their big city siblings, partly because the giants have been assaulted so often that they have diversified their operations and become virtually impenetrable.

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