Identity Theft Expert Frank Abagnale Participates in Insurance Industry Conference

NORWALK, Conn., Aug. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Frank Abagnale, subject of the best-selling novel and movie "Catch Me If You Can", and spokesperson for the Affinion Security Center's PrivacyGuard service, recently addressed the attendees of the 2008 Summer Conference of the Professional Insurance Marketing Association (PIMA). The conference brought together leaders in insurance direct marketing to discuss insurance group products as well as critical issues facing the industry.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080808/NYF018 )

Frank Abagnale is one of the world's leading authorities on fraud prevention and serves as a consultant to companies and government agencies worldwide. In his keynote address titled "Stealing Your Life", Abagnale focused on several key themes: consumers' personal data are increasingly available through a network of underground websites; every individual is capable of being a victim of identity theft; consumers cannot rely on government intervention to solve this growing problem.

"Frank's address was a real eye-opener to our audience," said Ronald Clarke, Co-Chair of the PIMA conference. "Through his engaging and enlightening presentation, the PIMA members left the conference with valuable information on how to protect our customers, and even ourselves, from identity theft."

Identity theft has been cited by the U.S. Justice Department as the leading consumer fraud in 2008, and as the fastest-growing crime in America. It is also quickly becoming a global crime, with chat rooms based out of Europe and Asia trading full identities of consumers and other compromised personal information, such as social security numbers, mother's maiden names, PIN numbers, and more.

The commission of identity theft is becoming increasingly sophisticated due to the use of technology to steal and then trade the data. Coupled with an increase in the reported incidences of security breaches at institutions housing large archives of personal financial data, Abagnale urged the PIMA audience to recognize that every individual is at risk of becoming an identity theft victim. Abagnale believes that governments will not be able to address this issue through legislation alone due to jurisdictional and resource limitations, and recommends providing services such as PrivacyGuard to arm consumers with tools to protect their identities from misuse.

PrivacyGuard offers daily credit monitoring, alerts to changes in a consumer's profile, credit reports, credit scores, and analysis. PrivacyGuard is offered as one of the services in the Affinion Security Center (www.affinionsecuritycenter.com), a leading provider of identity theft protection services for the customers of financial institutions, government agencies and other companies.

For more information, please visit www.affinionsecuritycenter.com

About Affinion Security Center

Affinion Security Center, a division of Norwalk, Conn.-based Affinion Group, is a premier security, credit monitoring and identity theft protection innovator with nearly 35 years of global experience. It launched HotLine, a leading ID theft, credit card, fraud protection and security service in 1969. PrivacyGuard, a comprehensive membership credit monitoring product which was created in 1992, remains one of the most widely used in the U.S. In 2006, ID Secure, a sophisticated tool that uses leading-edge public records, Social Security number and credit monitoring technology to fight ID theft, was born. Another ID theft protection service in Affinion's growing security business is PC SafetyPlus, an identity theft software service that protects members with a personal firewall to thwart hackers and other online ID threats. PC SafetyPlus software features automatic updates and service upgrades for protection against prevailing computer viruses, spyware and worms. In 2008 BreachShield, the preeminent solution to corporate data breach response, was introduced to the product line. Affinion Security Center is part of the steering committee of the Identity Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel (IDSP) and is a member of the Staples Security Council. For more information please visit www.affinion.com.

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