Cameron Stewart | July 04, 2009
Article from: The Australian
ADELAIDE schoolteacher Ginetta Rossi remembers feeling nauseous when told by authorities that she no longer officially existed.
Rossi, a primary school teacher of 20 years, was renewing her teacher's registration in Adelaide when she discovered that both her identity and her career qualifications had been stolen.
"They told me that their teaching records showed Ginetta Rossi had moved to Victoria the previous year," Rossi recalls.
"I told them I was Ginetta Rossi but they wouldn't believe me."
To make matters worse, when Rossi investigated further, she found that the woman who stole her identity was Renai Brochard, the partner of her former husband.
"I felt sick," says Rossi, who has agreed to speak publicly about her case for the first time.
"It would have been bad enough for someone off the street to steal my identity but this was my ex-husband's partner.
"I thought, 'who is going to believe me?"'
Rossi was a victim of what police say is the vogue crime of the new millennium: identity fraud. A staggering 124,000 Australians each year wake up one day to find that their identity has been stolen.
A further 383,300 also become victims of partial identity theft through credit card fraud.
Identity fraud, which costs Australians up to $4billion a year, is growing rapidly as criminals plunder our personal details from the internet, from rubbish bins, and from online chat rooms in order to adopt our identity. The problem has forced the government to launch new policies to fight the trend.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland told The Weekend Australian: "Identity security is central to Australia's national security, law enforcement and economic interests and vital in protecting Australian citizens from the theft or misuse of their identities."
Victims can lose their life savings or find debt-collectors on their doorstep for debts they did not accrue. Because it involves an invasion of privacy, it can also leave psychological scars.
In the case of Rossi, her loss of identity created ripple effects across two states. While police were investigating the identity theft, she was instructed not to tell anyone.
"I was freaking out thinking 'what if she has done something wrong using my name?'," she says.
Rossi's fears were well founded. By the time she discovered her identity had been stolen, Brochard - now registered in Victoria as teacher Ginetta Rossi - was causing havoc in an exclusive Melbourne private primary school.
Parents at that school, the Melbourne Montessori School, were complaining that the teacher of their six-year-old children did not appear to know the first thing about teaching.
But the school did not believe them for many months and continued to back the fake teacher. It was only when the real Rossi went to police that the whistle was blown on Brochard, who had been teaching at the $7000-a-year school for a full year. The saga ended last year when Brochard was convicted of deception and given a three-month suspended jail term.
But it continues to have an impact on the school, which became the subject of a full-scale review by the authorities and is awaiting a decision from Victorian authorities on whether it retains its registration.
Brochard, meanwhile, returned to South Australia and was employed by an Adelaide childcare centre that was not aware she was a convicted fraudster. She was sacked last October after her identity became known, prompting the South Australian government to order a review into how she was cleared by authorities to work at the Woodcroft childcare centre.
South Australian Early Childhood Development Minister Jay Weatherill this week declined to answer questions from The Weekend Australian about the outcome of that review. Brochard could not be contacted for comment.
Rossi says one of the most distressing aspects of losing her identity was convincing sceptical authorities that she was the real Ginetta Rossi.
"It was initially hard to get people to believe that I was who I said I was," she says. "I remember the look on the poor policewoman's face when I told her, 'I'm here to report identity fraud, I believe my ex-partner's partner has stolen my identity.' She must have thought I was a fruit-loop."
Brochard stole Rossi's identity by telling the Teachers Registration Board of South Australia she was Rossi and that she had lost her registration certificate and needed a duplicate copy.
Brochard then provided a false statutory declaration of her identity to convince authorities to give her a copy of the certificate, which they did.
She then moved to Victoria but when she applied to the Victorian Institute of Teaching to be registered in the state her fake application was shoddy. Brochard misspelled Ginetta on some registration documents and had whited out her name and replaced it with Rossi on her birth certificate.
Despite this, the VIT did not pick up the faults and agreed to register Brochard as a teacher.
Rossi was luckier than most victims of identity fraud in that Brochard did not steal her tax file number or gain access to her bank accounts. A report on identity crime by the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General last year said many victims lost not only their savings but also their personal credit ratings.
"Individual victims of identity crime spend an average of two or more years attempting to fix their credit report and restore their credit rating," the report says.
An increasingly common form of stealing people's personal details is through so-called "phishing emails", in which fake emails purporting to be from trusted institutions like banks ask people to provide personal details.
This week the Australian Federal Police warned of the circulation of a scam email that falsely claimed to be from the AFP and requested personal and financial information.
Arguably the fastest-growing area of identity fraud is via websites such as Facebook and chat rooms. Research conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance reveals 74 per cent of social networking users divulge personal information such as email addresses, names and birthdays.
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