Identity theft is on the rise – 10 million people were victimized in 2008 and the number is expected to be even greater in 2009.

Some of those thieves want to use your credit – they may steal a credit card and use it immediately to buy consumer goods, to take all their friends to a concert, or to dine at a 5-Star restaurant.

Other thieves use your good credit to open new accounts – after changing your address, of course, so you don’t know it’s happened until you try to use your own credit and find it has been destroyed.

But there is another kind of identity thief. This is the thief that wants your reputation.

For some people, it’s a matter of being able to rent an apartment, buy cable TV service, or get a job. Their own reputations – either financial or personal or both – are so trashed that they can do none of those things under their own name.

We are all aware of credit scores – the numbers that judge whether we’ll pay our bills on time. But in addition to those, experts say there are about 50 other scores that are kept on each of us.

From those scores, potential landlords and employers can judge whether we’ll be a good risk as a tenant or employee.

They look at things like stability in previous employment, how often people move, and even how often they change spouses.

So you can understand why someone who has had a history of leaving apartments “in the middle of the night” with rent unpaid and damages to be repaired might have trouble finding a new place to live.

You can also understand why an employer would be unwilling to spend the time and money to train a new employee if that person had a history of bouncing from job to job, or of being fired from one job after another.

For people who have built that kind of reputation, taking on the identity of a stable person with a good credit record would be like having a fresh start in life. Of course, if that’s how they live, their fresh start could trash YOUR reputation.

Unless you check your own credit report regularly, you may not find out that you have a new job until the IRS writes to ask you why you didn’t report all your income last year.

Check your credit report.

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