If you want to steal identities, Anthony Hayman might be your toughest target. The 22-year-old Lincoln resident has a Visa credit card, but he is proud to have never bought anything with it. He just keeps it handy for emergencies.

Hayman checks his e-mail and chats on the Internet with friends three or four times a day, but hasn’t bought anything from amazon.com or any other Web site, he said.

He pays for his Internet service provider, yahoo.com, with one check annually and avails himself of all of the anti-virus and firewall protections offered by Yahoo!

“I don’t trust anybody,” Hayman said amiably during a recent pit stop at the Irving gas station on Main Street, where he bought a carton of Marlboro cigarettes – with cash, of course. “I pay for everything in cash, if I can, or I don’t buy anything. I just prefer cash.”

People like Hayman are probably why the Federal Trade Commission, in a survey released last month, ranked Maine 48th out of the 50 states for self-reported identity theft crimes. The study set the number of self-reported identity-theft victims in Maine at 424 – or 32.2 people per 100,000 – for 2004.

Given that the FTC reported more than 635,000 consumer fraud and ID theft complaints in 2004 and losses from related fraud of more than $547 million last year, the low ranking is good news for Mainers.

“The overall message is that Maine citizens are very wary,” said Lt. Timothy Doyle, commanding officer of Maine State Police Criminal Investigations Division II, which covers Kennebec, Somerset, Sagadahoc, Lincoln, Knox and Waldo counties.

But that does not obscure the growing problem of identity theft.

Only anecdotal evidence

“For the past five years, identity theft has been the number one complaint we have received from consumers,” Claudia Bourne Farrell, a senior press officer with the FTC, said recently. “But if you look at the surveys, it doesn’t appear that it is growing.

“It’s a serious problem, especially if you’re a victim,” Farrell added. “It costs billions of dollars, some of it to consumers, some of it to businesses.”

“It’s a significant problem,” Doyle said, “and I am sure the number of complaints they report is only a fraction of what’s going on.”

Farrell agreed: The evidence the FTC collected is anecdotal, she said.

In fact, the Uniform Crime Report, the federal government’s annual state-by-state report of criminal activity, does not require state and local police to count the number of identity thefts reported or the number of frauds or thefts that result from ID theft.

So no one really knows how many ID thefts occur.

Estimates vary. A survey done by the FTC and one co-sponsored by the Better Business Bureau suggest that nine to 10 million people were ID theft victims in 2003 and 2004. Earlier FBI estimates claimed 500,000 to 700,000 Americans become identity theft victims annually.

Incidental media reports of ID theft cases are only beginning to draw an outline around the problem. The most recent case: ChoicePoint, a Georgia-based data warehouser, announced Feb. 21 that it may have allowed criminals to access information about 144,778 people nationwide, including motor vehicle registrations, license and deed transfers, military records, names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

In Maine, 257 people may have been affected, according to a state-by-state breakdown the company released. The largest number, 34,114, were Californians.

And that’s with just one company being victimized.

Individual thieves can have a profound impact even in “small” crimes. Steven Morehouse is a 67-year-old New Hampshire man who authorities claim had spent 23 years making a living by stealing other people’s identities.

Federal officials say he bilked more than $346,000 out of people from North Carolina to Maine in 2004. His case is pending in U.S. District Court in Portland.The smallest cases can hurt badly. A 32-year-old Maine man who authorities say stole a New Hampshire woman’s Social Security number caused the single mom to lose Medicaid benefits.

Richard A. Kendall of St. Albans was arraigned Dec. 30 in New Hampshire’s Concord District Court on two counts of identity fraud. That case is pending.

Police have little training

Local and state police are almost totally unequipped to deal with the problem. They frankly admit that ID theft cases and related frauds are a low, if not nonexistent, priority.

“To some extent, this may be viewed as a victimless crime, which isn’t true,” Doyle said. “It’s certainly a lower priority for us when compared to crimes against people.”

“Obviously if it comes in as a complaint, you deal with it, but I am not aware of anybody in Maine law enforcement circles who has had any specialized training in that other than classes held at various chiefs’ meetings,” said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association. “And those classes are basically informational classes, not technical classes.”

Despite the fact that home personal computers have been around since the early 1980s, the Maine Criminal Justice Academy at Vassalboro, which trains local and state police, offers no specialized basic or advanced training or classes in computer crime, ID theft or related fraud.

“I think it’s typical that training not be offered at police academies. It’s such a new area that I think people [in law enforcement] don’t know a whole lot about it,” John B. Rogers, Maine Criminal Justice Academy director, said.

“We do basic training here, and we don’t do a topic on ID theft,” Rogers added.

Rogers felt the sting of ID theft directly last summer. He said he was attending a high school reunion when he got a telephone call from his credit card company asking if he had bought anything for $1,600 from a sporting goods store in Ohio. His credit card had been stolen, he said.

A shadowy crime

The state’s sole computer crime investigative unit, the Maine Computer Crimes Task Force, has only three officers. They are Detective Scot Bradeen of the Lewiston Police Department; Maine State Police Detective Thomas Bureau; and Maine State Police Sgt. Glenn Lang, who was due to resume his post as unit supervisor on Feb. 28 after budget cuts eliminated the position a year ago.

The task force, Doyle said, is overworked. Mainly it combs through seized computers for state police and other agencies in search of clues as to the crimes in which they were used, an arduous task.

In 2001-2002, a total of 291 criminal cases were referred to the unit by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the state’s cyber-tip line, and by other law enforcement agencies, he said.

In 2003-2004, a total of 510 criminal cases were referred to the unit, Doyle said. Many cases involve child pornography or molestation; other computers were used in homicides or other crimes more serious than theft, Doyle said.

When faced with the choice of investigating a crime that injures or threatens to injure someone – such as homicide or molestation – or a crime where money is taken, police obviously must choose to protect lives first, Doyle said.

The number of computers that the unit must examine continues to increase. In 2001-2002, the unit was sent 217 computers for examination; in 2003-2004, 351 computers were sent in.

At present, the unit has a backlog of about 240 computer-crime cases and 80 computers, Doyle said. Ten cases date back to last year.

“When you consider that it takes about 80 uninterrupted work-hours to process one computer,” Doyle said, “that backlog is obviously significant.”

Another problem: the daunting nature of computer crime itself. For police to investigate identity theft properly, investigators need to know a computer’s hard-drive, file- and operating-system architecture and forensic data retrieval and analysis, among other things.

The global nature of computer crime also raises numerous problems.

“Crime used to be essentially local crime. Now if you’re on a computer, your identity can be stolen from the other side of the world,” Doyle said. “That makes these crimes very difficult to investigate.”

“By the time we get a report of ID theft, they [criminals] might have picked up stakes and moved on,” Detective Sgt. Ed Sawyer of the South Portland Police Department, said. “It’s extremely difficult to follow-up on these cases.”

The Portland area recorded 42 ID theft victims in 2004, the largest number in Maine, according to the FTC report. Bangor was next with 16 victims; Biddeford had 13.

Legislative help is coming

Yet government and law enforcement are beginning to focus on ID theft.

The FTC is phasing in a service nationally through which Americans who want to make sure their credit reports are accurate can get the information free from the three major credit bureaus – Equifax Inc., Experian Information Solutions and TransUnion.

People in Midwestern states will become eligible for free reports on March 1, followed by Southern states on June 1 and Eastern states on Sept. 1. The FTC is staggering the requesting period to help the credit bureaus deal with an expected crush of requests.

Maine residents already have free access to their credit reports once a year as part of a block of laws the Legislature passed in 2003 requiring credit card numbers to be masked on sales receipts, said Will Lund, director of the state Office of Consumer Credit Regulation, which oversees the implementation of the state’s Fair Credit Reporting laws.

He called that effort the most important legislative move to assist victims of ID theft since the problem began to draw attention.

Efforts to limit the sharing of sensitive financial information among credit agencies have failed to pass the Legislature, said Charles Dow, spokesman for the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

Lund predicted the passage this year of a bill, LD 581, allowing ID theft victims to freeze their credit reports until they can be fixed.

Sponsored by Sen. Lynn Bromley, that bill was referred to the Legislature’s Committee on Business, Research and Economic Development on Feb. 8, according to the Legislature’s Web site.

Other agencies are working on closing loopholes that identity thieves slip through, Dow said.

“It’s an issue that legislators and the business community are increasingly taking notice of,” Dow said. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Until that work is done, the best thing Maine residents can do, Doyle said, is stay wary.