閱讀理解專項練習(xí) 3 5 篇 1.2007 年 12 月英語六級閱讀專項訓(xùn)練(1) Giving Credit Where
Credit Is Not Due The big identity-theft bust last week was just a taste of what's to
come. Here's how to protect your good name HERE'S THE SCARY THING about the identity-
theft ring that the feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40,000
victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according
to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm
that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those
reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to
cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their
names. Cost to the victims: $3 million and rising. Even scarier is that this, the largest
identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700,000
Americans have their credit hijacked every year. It's one of crime's biggest growth
markets. A name, address and Social Security number--which can often be found on the Web
--is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3
trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little
financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure. As it stands
now,