You would like to think that when a person gets convicted of identity theft, he or she would receive the proper punishment and think more than twice about committing the crime again. Too bad this is not always the case. For example, Aurea Picasso of Illinois was convicted of identity theft and lived to steal another day.
In fact, she was hired to be the director of welfare in Hanover County, while she was awaiting trial for her first crime – which was stealing from the welfare system. Even after she stole another $25,000 on top of the $200,000 she was on trial for, she wasn’t fired from her job until she committed an unrelated offense.
What’s even more interested is that Picasso, upon learning that people may have been catching on to her crimes, decided to have a shredding party in the office with several other county employees, to destroy evidence that would help support the identity theft charges coming against her. It’s curious to wonder whether these other people knew what they were shredding or were just happy to spend a day doing something different. It’s too bad for Picasso that the state had additional copies of these documents.
To learn from this situation? You can’t always count on the government or law enforcement to protect you from identity theft. Even though state and national agencies can be an important tool in fighting these types of crimes, mistakes can happen and people can fall under the radar – even in pretty blatant cases.
It’s important to keep yourself safe and not rely on anyone else to protect you. One way to do that is to take the imitative and look into personal identity theft protection.
Its probably best to start by looking at our top rated identity protection services like LifeLock, TrustedID and Identity Guard and seeing which plan suits your family best. Reviews are found at the top right corner of every page.