Brownsville, Texas and Brooklyn, N.Y., tops in ID theft

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Want to lessen your odds of becoming a victim of identity theft? Don't move to Brownsville, Texas.

More specifically, stay out of the city's ZIP code, 78521.

That ZIP code has the dubious distinction of generating the most identity theft complaints over the last half decade, according to a Scripps Howard News Service analysis of more than 1.4 million reports made by consumers to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Residents from that ZIP code generated 1,513 complaints -- far more than the 922 complaints from the second-place ZIP code, 90044, near Inglewood, Calif.

Another nearby Brownsville ZIP code, 78520, ranks 12th nationally with 813 consumer complaints. Also high on the list are ZIP codes in Texas towns near Brownsville, including Mission, Pharr and Weslaco.

Brownsville, a bustling international seaport on the Gulf of Mexico with a population approaching 200,000, sits astride two crucial corridors of crime: the international drug superhighway and the path for illegal immigrants, according to experts.

"You've got several different things that line up along the Texas-Mexico border that contribute to identity theft," said Paula Pierce, managing attorney at Austin, Texas-based Victims Initiative for Counseling, Advocacy and Restoration of the Southwest.

Drug cartels use identity theft to get prescriptions for ingredients of methamphetamine, according to Pierce, who helps ID theft victims from across Texas, including from Brownsville. They also use identity theft to launder money, by opening bank accounts in others' names.

"It's along the corridor for transporting drugs from South America and Mexico up to the United States and Canada," Pierce said. "So geography plays some role."

Another factor is illegal immigration.

"Identity theft and illegal immigration are interwoven so bad," said Larry Wilson, director of Identity Theft Victims Support Group of North America. "When you have one, you've got the other."

So-called "coyotes" who smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States have made a lucrative business selling stolen Social Security numbers to the aliens, Wilson said. That personal information is essential for getting a job.

Brownsville police declined an interview request. And it's not an issue city residents want to discuss either. Pierce, the victims advocate, contacted a dozen victims from the city, none of whom agreed to share their story publicly.

"I don't blame them," Pierce said. "It is a crime that is so invasive."

While victims are clustered in the Brownsville area, an epicenter for identity thieves appears to be 2,000 miles away in Brooklyn, N.Y. Six of the 10 ZIP codes most frequently listed as the location of the ID thief are in Brooklyn. Topping the list of locations is ZIP code 11226 (381 complaints), followed by ZIP code 11212 (342 complaints).

Officials at the FTC note that all the complaints are self-reported and largely unverified. Of the 1.4 million consumer complaints to the FTC from January 2005 through March 2010, some 197,783 records -- or 14.1 percent -- included information on where the suspected thief was operating.

Pierce and Wilson said that there is a connection between identity theft and international criminal operations, which frequently have outposts in New York. Frequently, fake e-mail "phishing" scams are based in Romania, the Dominican Republic and Russia.

"New York is headquarters for mafia groups, and there are international crime rings that operate massive identity theft and fraud scams in the United States," Pierce said.

But Meg Garvin, executive director of the National Crime Law Victim Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., is skeptical that victims know the true location of their predators.

"It is so difficult to unravel where the offender is," said Garvin, whose group investigates international ID theft and fraud schemes.

Another possibility is that identity thieves may give victims false, New York-based addresses, according to New York City Police Department spokesman Sgt. Carlos Nieves.

"I have no idea why this coming up," Nieves said, adding that New York City police do not track identity theft by zip code.

For interactive map with breakdown of types of identity theft nationwide by ZIP code, go to: http://scrippsnews.com/content/map-identity-theft-complaints-zip-code

(E-mail reporter Isaac Wolf at wolfi(at)shns.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)