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December 20, 2004
Private eyes | A new Westbrook firm hopes to lure customers with its identity theft prevention technology
By Sara Donnelly
Justin Page got his start in the identity theft protection business in 2000 when he helped a well-known television cop, Jerry Orbach from "Law & Order," sue to reclaim the domain name jerryorbach.com, which had been cybersquatted by someone pretending to be the actor. Now Page is hoping to turn that experience into a revenue-producing business. Around the first of the year, Page and two partners will launch Privacy ProBot, a patent-pending anti-identity theft technology designed by Page. ProBot trolls the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, searching for evidence of potentially harmful exchanges of subscribers' private information, and then helps subscribers remove the information or minimize threats to their identity.
"It searches thousands of databases both private and public to find information about the subscribers that they would otherwise not know is out there about them," says President and COO Rebecca Weinstein. Privacy ProBot monitors commercial, public and criminal repositories ˆ including chat rooms, media sites and government sites ˆ that, according to its founders, free Internet search engines are not able to access.
Identity Cops, the Westbrook firm Page founded with Weinstein, a former attorney who specialized in civil liberties, and Lynn Bromley, a therapist and state senator from South Portland, sees a lucrative market in identity theft ˆ including credit card fraud, loan fraud and insurance fraud ˆ which is one of the fastest growing crimes in the country. Nearly 10 million people, or 4.6% of the population, were victims of identity theft in 2002, according to the Federal Trade Commission. According to Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Research, cases of identity theft in 2003 increased nearly 80% from 2002.
Weinstein says Privacy ProBot is the only service in the industry able to alert subscribers of possible identity theft before any actual damage has been done. However, experts interviewed for this story say identity theft prediction services like the one the company plans to provide are neither unique nor necessarily valuable.
Mark McCreary, an attorney specializing in Internet privacy law at Fox Rothschild LLP in Philadelphia, says free services like Yahoo's Alerts search and a simple Google scan can come up with much of the same data most professional Internet searches can. And even if ProBot could find instances of personal information that for some reason a free search could not uncover ˆ information exchanged in chat rooms for example ˆ there's little a consumer can do to fight back, he says.
"I just don't know what you're going to do in practicality [finding personal information on the Web] other than sleep less at night," says McCreary. "There are definitely things you can do, but it's very expensive to hire a lawyer and it's likely you won't be successful."
But Page says successful recovery of personal information is exactly what distinguishes Identity Cops from any other anti-identity theft service. "Yahoo Alerts and Google work if your name is in the news or if your name is indexed on a website," Page says. "Our service is geared toward databases where identity theft is more specifically indicated, and what makes [Privacy ProBot] truly unique is the way that it deals with recovery. While credit bureaus will monitor your credit report to see if there's any nefarious activity, we will do automated notification to banks and credit bureaus, make automatic account closures. We can direct people to attorneys [who specialize in identity theft]. It makes Identity Cops a privacy clearinghouse for clients."
Page says an individual could, theoretically, try to re-create the search capacity of Privacy ProBot, but the depth and direction of the search would not be comparable to the company's service.
Something for everyone
Identity Cops actually is Page's second attempt to enter the identity theft prevention business. Soon after helping Orbach reclaim his site, Page, who has worked for more than 15 years as a technology officer and corporate manager, launched a company called EPrivex in New York City with Orbach's son, Chris. EPrivex also relied on Privacy ProBot, which Page developed in 2000. The original concept was to market the service strictly to celebrities, who are frequent targets of identity thieves. "But after the software was built, we realized this really wasn't just for celebrities, this is something everybody could use," Page says.
However, due to Page's "business and personal reasons," not least of which was the 2000 burst of the Internet bubble, EPrivex folded after a year. Page continued to pursue a patent for ProBot, which has yet to be granted. Then Weinstein, a longtime friend of Page's, convinced him to move to Maine and restart a company based on the Privacy ProBot technology. Bromley, a friend of Weinstein's, was brought on board to manage the company's business development. Earlier this year, Page, Weinstein and Bromley formed Identity Cops, a reincarnation of EPrivex which offers many of the same services. According to Page, Jerry Orbach is an honorary co-founder of the company and is actively involved in its operations.
Page says he chose to locate the business here because he says Maine programs like the Maine Enterprise Growth Fund and the Maine Small Business Fund have provided significant financial and advisory support as Identity Cops seeks to gain a foothold in the identity theft prevention market; in October, the company was awarded a $10,000 seed grant by the Maine Technology Institute.
Page and Weinstein say Identity Cops will help stem the tide of identity theft by anticipating privacy violations before thieves manage to damage a subscriber's credit or otherwise assume his or her identity. Their service does this by scanning credit card applications, public records, media reports, 1,500-2,000 Internet chat rooms, medical records, criminal records and domain name registrations. When ProBot finds a subscriber's information, it sends the subscriber an e-mail encouraging her to visit her personal ID Cops website for more information and suggestions on how to take action against the possible infringement. "You can really see what the world can see about you," says Page. "With our program it would let you know prior to an [identity theft] event occurring."
Page and Weinstein believe the earlier attempt to market ProBot through EPrivex failed in part because of a general lack of public awareness of identity theft in 2000. Now, with at least 9.91 million identity theft victims in this country, Page and Weinstein feel the market for a preventive system is stronger. "A lot of [companies] are grabbing onto identity theft as something that scares people, that motivates people, but they're not coming through with an end-to-end solution," says Page.
Identity Cops' founders, of course, feel that Privacy ProBot is that solution.
To catch a thief
But identity thieves are also some of the toughest criminals to chase down; the Gartner study found that only one in 700 identity thieves is ever caught, and some identity theft experts wonder if a prediction program like ProBot provides any actionable information that couldn't be obtained through free services already available.
According to Jordana Beebe, communications director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, Calif., a nonprofit consumer rights organization, jurisdiction limitations often put a wrench in a consumer's hunt for an identity thief who may live hundreds of miles away. And many chat rooms that thieves might use, she says, are locked by a password. "In some ways it's good to get the information to take proactive steps, but people can take the same steps whether they're alerted to the information or not," says Beebe. "With the ability to put a fraud alert for free on your credit card and receive a free copy of your credit report I have a hard time rationalizing paying for this service."
McCreary, the Philadelphia attorney, also wonders how Identity Cops will help subscribers remove personal information posted on public sites like city and county websites. In McCreary's experience, convincing officials to remove information legally posted on a website ˆ like name and address ˆ depends on the willingness of a particular region's officials.
Sometime after New Year's, though, Identity Cops will forge ahead with its launch plans. The firm will offer a year's subscription first to Maine residents at $49.95 a year, rather than the regular rate of $89.95 a year. For an additional fee ˆ from $50 to $50,000 depending on the nature of the service ˆ Identity Cops also provides legal, administrative and law enforcement referrals, special connections the company maintains can help subscribers remove personal information found by ProBot. Weinstein says efforts to remove personal information from the public domain, for example, have been effective. But she also says that her company's role is not to catch identity thieves but rather to keep subscribers informed.
"We're not looking to catch the bad guys necessarily," she says. "A very small number of people are actually caught. It's our job to find the information."
During the Maine trial, Weinstein says Identity Cops hopes to find between 100-500 subscribers. Nationally, she hopes to reach 1,000 subscribers during the first year with a marketing campaign that will include Internet and television advertisements. In addition, the firm is looking for individual investors to help build the company's financial base, though Weinstein would not reveal Identity Cops' fundraising goals.
At the height of its operation in 2000, EPrivex employed 10 people. Currently, Identity Cops' staff is made up solely of its three principals, but Page hopes to match the former staff of EPrivex within the first three years of the new company's operation.
However, according to a 2003 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, Maine ranks 47th in the country in number of identity theft victims. Arizona, at the top, logged a total of 6,832 victims in 2003. Maine reported 353. But the statistics don't seem to bother Identity Cops' founders. "We wanted to launch the product first in Maine to use Maine as a test market," says Page, "and to really solidify the business as a Maine business."
"It searches thousands of databases both private and public to find information about the subscribers that they would otherwise not know is out there about them," says President and COO Rebecca Weinstein. Privacy ProBot monitors commercial, public and criminal repositories ˆ including chat rooms, media sites and government sites ˆ that, according to its founders, free Internet search engines are not able to access.
Identity Cops, the Westbrook firm Page founded with Weinstein, a former attorney who specialized in civil liberties, and Lynn Bromley, a therapist and state senator from South Portland, sees a lucrative market in identity theft ˆ including credit card fraud, loan fraud and insurance fraud ˆ which is one of the fastest growing crimes in the country. Nearly 10 million people, or 4.6% of the population, were victims of identity theft in 2002, according to the Federal Trade Commission. According to Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Research, cases of identity theft in 2003 increased nearly 80% from 2002.
Weinstein says Privacy ProBot is the only service in the industry able to alert subscribers of possible identity theft before any actual damage has been done. However, experts interviewed for this story say identity theft prediction services like the one the company plans to provide are neither unique nor necessarily valuable.
Mark McCreary, an attorney specializing in Internet privacy law at Fox Rothschild LLP in Philadelphia, says free services like Yahoo's Alerts search and a simple Google scan can come up with much of the same data most professional Internet searches can. And even if ProBot could find instances of personal information that for some reason a free search could not uncover ˆ information exchanged in chat rooms for example ˆ there's little a consumer can do to fight back, he says.
"I just don't know what you're going to do in practicality [finding personal information on the Web] other than sleep less at night," says McCreary. "There are definitely things you can do, but it's very expensive to hire a lawyer and it's likely you won't be successful."
But Page says successful recovery of personal information is exactly what distinguishes Identity Cops from any other anti-identity theft service. "Yahoo Alerts and Google work if your name is in the news or if your name is indexed on a website," Page says. "Our service is geared toward databases where identity theft is more specifically indicated, and what makes [Privacy ProBot] truly unique is the way that it deals with recovery. While credit bureaus will monitor your credit report to see if there's any nefarious activity, we will do automated notification to banks and credit bureaus, make automatic account closures. We can direct people to attorneys [who specialize in identity theft]. It makes Identity Cops a privacy clearinghouse for clients."
Page says an individual could, theoretically, try to re-create the search capacity of Privacy ProBot, but the depth and direction of the search would not be comparable to the company's service.
Something for everyone
Identity Cops actually is Page's second attempt to enter the identity theft prevention business. Soon after helping Orbach reclaim his site, Page, who has worked for more than 15 years as a technology officer and corporate manager, launched a company called EPrivex in New York City with Orbach's son, Chris. EPrivex also relied on Privacy ProBot, which Page developed in 2000. The original concept was to market the service strictly to celebrities, who are frequent targets of identity thieves. "But after the software was built, we realized this really wasn't just for celebrities, this is something everybody could use," Page says.
However, due to Page's "business and personal reasons," not least of which was the 2000 burst of the Internet bubble, EPrivex folded after a year. Page continued to pursue a patent for ProBot, which has yet to be granted. Then Weinstein, a longtime friend of Page's, convinced him to move to Maine and restart a company based on the Privacy ProBot technology. Bromley, a friend of Weinstein's, was brought on board to manage the company's business development. Earlier this year, Page, Weinstein and Bromley formed Identity Cops, a reincarnation of EPrivex which offers many of the same services. According to Page, Jerry Orbach is an honorary co-founder of the company and is actively involved in its operations.
Page says he chose to locate the business here because he says Maine programs like the Maine Enterprise Growth Fund and the Maine Small Business Fund have provided significant financial and advisory support as Identity Cops seeks to gain a foothold in the identity theft prevention market; in October, the company was awarded a $10,000 seed grant by the Maine Technology Institute.
Page and Weinstein say Identity Cops will help stem the tide of identity theft by anticipating privacy violations before thieves manage to damage a subscriber's credit or otherwise assume his or her identity. Their service does this by scanning credit card applications, public records, media reports, 1,500-2,000 Internet chat rooms, medical records, criminal records and domain name registrations. When ProBot finds a subscriber's information, it sends the subscriber an e-mail encouraging her to visit her personal ID Cops website for more information and suggestions on how to take action against the possible infringement. "You can really see what the world can see about you," says Page. "With our program it would let you know prior to an [identity theft] event occurring."
Page and Weinstein believe the earlier attempt to market ProBot through EPrivex failed in part because of a general lack of public awareness of identity theft in 2000. Now, with at least 9.91 million identity theft victims in this country, Page and Weinstein feel the market for a preventive system is stronger. "A lot of [companies] are grabbing onto identity theft as something that scares people, that motivates people, but they're not coming through with an end-to-end solution," says Page.
Identity Cops' founders, of course, feel that Privacy ProBot is that solution.
To catch a thief
But identity thieves are also some of the toughest criminals to chase down; the Gartner study found that only one in 700 identity thieves is ever caught, and some identity theft experts wonder if a prediction program like ProBot provides any actionable information that couldn't be obtained through free services already available.
According to Jordana Beebe, communications director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, Calif., a nonprofit consumer rights organization, jurisdiction limitations often put a wrench in a consumer's hunt for an identity thief who may live hundreds of miles away. And many chat rooms that thieves might use, she says, are locked by a password. "In some ways it's good to get the information to take proactive steps, but people can take the same steps whether they're alerted to the information or not," says Beebe. "With the ability to put a fraud alert for free on your credit card and receive a free copy of your credit report I have a hard time rationalizing paying for this service."
McCreary, the Philadelphia attorney, also wonders how Identity Cops will help subscribers remove personal information posted on public sites like city and county websites. In McCreary's experience, convincing officials to remove information legally posted on a website ˆ like name and address ˆ depends on the willingness of a particular region's officials.
Sometime after New Year's, though, Identity Cops will forge ahead with its launch plans. The firm will offer a year's subscription first to Maine residents at $49.95 a year, rather than the regular rate of $89.95 a year. For an additional fee ˆ from $50 to $50,000 depending on the nature of the service ˆ Identity Cops also provides legal, administrative and law enforcement referrals, special connections the company maintains can help subscribers remove personal information found by ProBot. Weinstein says efforts to remove personal information from the public domain, for example, have been effective. But she also says that her company's role is not to catch identity thieves but rather to keep subscribers informed.
"We're not looking to catch the bad guys necessarily," she says. "A very small number of people are actually caught. It's our job to find the information."
During the Maine trial, Weinstein says Identity Cops hopes to find between 100-500 subscribers. Nationally, she hopes to reach 1,000 subscribers during the first year with a marketing campaign that will include Internet and television advertisements. In addition, the firm is looking for individual investors to help build the company's financial base, though Weinstein would not reveal Identity Cops' fundraising goals.
At the height of its operation in 2000, EPrivex employed 10 people. Currently, Identity Cops' staff is made up solely of its three principals, but Page hopes to match the former staff of EPrivex within the first three years of the new company's operation.
However, according to a 2003 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, Maine ranks 47th in the country in number of identity theft victims. Arizona, at the top, logged a total of 6,832 victims in 2003. Maine reported 353. But the statistics don't seem to bother Identity Cops' founders. "We wanted to launch the product first in Maine to use Maine as a test market," says Page, "and to really solidify the business as a Maine business."
Protecting your people
According to Linda Foley, co-owner of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, Calif., one of the best ways to eradicate identity theft is for businesses to gather and disseminate private information cautiously. Here are a few of her suggestions for businesses looking to improve information security:
Information acquisition
Only ask for necessary personal information from clients or employees and make sure it is acquired in a secure way.
Storage
Install strong security measures on computer systems storing personal data. Make sure personal information is not stored on a common access computer.
Access
Who has access to personal information at your company? Access should be on a need-to-know basis. Do you have password control over your information systems? Did you do a background check on employees who have access to personal information? Do temporary employees have access?
Disposal
Make electronic and paper documents with personal information unreadable prior to disposal. Know what personal information might be tossed in your dumpster.
Distribution
How do you handle the gathering of personal information? Limit any public display, use and exchange of Social Security numbers and other private information, including on membership cards.
Information acquisition
Only ask for necessary personal information from clients or employees and make sure it is acquired in a secure way.
Storage
Install strong security measures on computer systems storing personal data. Make sure personal information is not stored on a common access computer.
Access
Who has access to personal information at your company? Access should be on a need-to-know basis. Do you have password control over your information systems? Did you do a background check on employees who have access to personal information? Do temporary employees have access?
Disposal
Make electronic and paper documents with personal information unreadable prior to disposal. Know what personal information might be tossed in your dumpster.
Distribution
How do you handle the gathering of personal information? Limit any public display, use and exchange of Social Security numbers and other private information, including on membership cards.
Identity Cops
11 Main St., Ste. 7-143, Westbrook
Founders: Justin Page, Rebecca Weinstein, Lynn Bromley
Founded: 2004
Employees: Three
Services: Privacy ProBot, a 24-hour computerized identity theft prevention and protection package; legal referrals; automated recovery services
Revenues, 2004: None
Projected revenues, 2005: Did not disclose
Projected subscribers: 1,000 in the first year
Contact: 221-1029
www.idcops.com
Founders: Justin Page, Rebecca Weinstein, Lynn Bromley
Founded: 2004
Employees: Three
Services: Privacy ProBot, a 24-hour computerized identity theft prevention and protection package; legal referrals; automated recovery services
Revenues, 2004: None
Projected revenues, 2005: Did not disclose
Projected subscribers: 1,000 in the first year
Contact: 221-1029
www.idcops.com
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The Giving Guide
The Giving Guide helps nonprofits have the opportunity to showcase and differentiate their organizations so that businesses better understand how they can contribute to a nonprofit’s mission and work.
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Work for ME
Work for ME is a workforce development tool to help Maine’s employers target Maine’s emerging workforce. Work for ME highlights each industry, its impact on Maine’s economy, the jobs available to entry-level workers, the training and education needed to get a career started.
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