Red flags while job hunting Unemployed and feeling desperate? This is no time to drop your guard and inadvertently expose your personal data to identity thieves posing as potential employers. Plenty of con artists are lurking around seeking personal information that they can steal—or, in a case that the Virginia Attorney General’s Office is pursuing against Virginia Employment Services Inc. of Norfolk, guaranteeing people a job in exchange for an upfront fee, typically $365, and then failing to find them employment.

A Lynchburg woman will spend more than two years in prison for stealing the identities of patients at two assisted living facilities.

Phone scammers have been using a new tactic to target small businesses in the Richmond area, the Better Business Bureau of Central Virginia Inc. warned yesterday. The organization said it has received several complaints in the past month about scam artists using phone-relay service to defraud businesses. Phone-relay service is typically used by hearing-impaired people to make phone calls. The caller contacts an operator who relays a typed message to the called party.

A sophisticated identity-theft ring that counted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s wife among its victims didn’t stop at stealing money electronically. Authorities said yesterday that it also sent a woman wearing a variety of wigs into bank branches to drain their accounts in person. Shonya Michelle Young, 38, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., was being held yesterday at a federal detention center in Miami on a charge of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

A happy family vacation in Virginia Beach turned into a nightmare for a retired Chesterfield County couple who became victims of identity theft. Two days after Robert and Doris Struhmer’s trip, someone began draining $5,200 from their checking account. Over a 10-day period, unknown to them, a thief conducted numerous fraudulent transactions by phone and with fake checks using the Struhmers’ checking account and routing numbers, even paying telephone and cell-phone bills and making a mortgage payment.

Todd Davis has made himself something of a poster child of the identity-theft crisis. Davis, chairman of Arizona-based LifeLock Inc., warns that no one can stop all identity theft, but they can take measures to protect themselves. Of course, LifeLock offers credit-monitoring services. But Davis is so sure LifeLock can protect people’s Social Security numbers that he plasters his number—457-55-5462—on the company’s advertisements.

This week’s indictment of a hacker believed responsible for the biggest retail-store data breaches in U.S. history doesn’t necessarily make shoppers safer from having their credit-card numbers plundered. Accomplices to the crimes are believed to be on the loose in Russia or other countries where U.S. authorities are less likely to get them. And the underlying security holes mined by the hackers still exist in many payment networks.

Federal prosecutors charged a Miami man with the largest case of credit-and debit-card data theft ever in the United States, accusing the one-time government informant of swiping 130 million accounts on top of 40 million he stole previously. Albert Gonzalez, 28, broke his own record for identity theft by hacking into retail networks, according to prosecutors, though they say his illicit computer exploits ended when he went to jail on charges stemming from an earlier case.

For the third time, the Federal Trade Commission has put off the enforcement date for so-called “red flag” rules that require businesses to adopt plans to prevent identify theft. The agency had been scheduled to begin enforcing the rules starting tomorrow, but it announced Wednesday that it would delay the effective date until Nov. 1 in order to better educate businesses about the rules.

If there’s one thing the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t need to know, it’s your bank-account number. Nor your Social Security number. Nor any other information that could lead to identity theft. At this point in the process, in fact, the only thing census workers must verify is the address of your residence and whether there are any other dwellings on the property. That’s so surveys can be mailed to the right addresses next March.

Identity-theft complaints rose 21 percent in the Richmond area in 2008, according to a Federal Trade Commission report. The region ranked 239th among the 380 largest metropolitan areas in the nation. The ranking is based on the number of identity-theft complaints per 100,000 residents. In 2007, the area was No. 244. The FTC received 1,162 identity-theft complaints among consumers in the Richmond area in 2008, compared with 961 in 2007.