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Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday Nikki Junker from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) guest posts a piece that relates to identity theft. This week we asked her to tell our readers about The ITRC and the resources available.
Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) was established in December 1999 to support victims of identity theft in resolving their cases, and to broaden public education and awareness in the understanding of identity theft. In addition to victim services and consumer education, ITRC works in partnership with other groups and agencies involved in the battle against this crime.
The ITRC Mission Statement is “to provide best-in-class victim assistance at no charge to consumers throughout the United States, educate consumers, corporations, government agencies, and other organizations on best practices for fraud and identity theft detection, reduction and mitigation and provide enterprise consulting and outsourced services related to information breach, fraud and identity theft”.
The ITRC is a California 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and is based out of San Diego, CA where we run a no-cost victim assistance call center. This call center is vital to our mission statement and victim calls always take priority within the center. The center has the ability to go from two advisors on the call queue up to eight advisors should the situation arise when there is a rush of victim calls. It is very important to us that we are there for the victims right when they call to help them through the painstaking process of addressing their identity theft. Victims will often tell us that we are the first phone number they have called that has been able to give them any answers and we are very proud of that. The center will handle nearly 11,000 identity theft calls this year and mitigate more than 6,500 identity theft cases, each of which can require hours of knowledgeable assistance. Needless to say our advisors are always busy!
The ITRC is the primary national non-profit organization that focuses on identity theft and cooperates with a wide variety of law enforcement and governmental agencies, providing information and training on the latest trends in identity theft and fraud.
As far as public education and outreach, the ITRC maintains and updates more than 240 written documents, videos and games to provide victim assistance and education on a variety of topics regarding fraud and identity theft. The center maintains a Google ranked 7 website. This site reported record high web traffic during 2009, with nearly 1.4 million visits, more than 3.5 million page views, and tens of thousands of downloads each month. Our site provides a wide variety of information on identity theft issues to consumers and others with identity theft interests. Documents are presented in English, Spanish and Chinese, as we are always trying to reach broader and broader audiences.
The ITRC provides an average of 50 presentations a year on identity theft, from neighborhood community events to state summits and national conferences. We also publish a quarterly e-newsletter, ITRaC News, which addresses a wide variety of identity theft issues such as scams, legislation, trends, and industry expert views. Most recently, the center has ventured out into the wide world of social media and has begun to help victims and spread public awareness via this new and exciting platform.
In the future, the center looks forward to helping more people and continuing the fight against identity theft.
