MyTwoCensus Exclusive: Identity Theft, Scams, and the Census Bureau
Thanks to reporter Larry Collins at NBC affiliate WCBD in Charleston, South Carolina for tipping us off to potential problems with sinister individuals posing as census enumerators. In the view of MyTwoCensus.com, the main problem here is that enumerators’ ID badges look unofficial, can be forged easily, and lack photo identification. Thus, since there are 1.4 million Americans who have been/will be hired to work as census takers, it’s highly likely that a workers’ badge has been/will be stolen or copied to use for criminal activities such as identity theft and fraud.
We’ve already sent our inquiries to the Census Bureau to find out they provide workers with ID badges that can be forged so easily…Don’t worry America, we’ll get to the bottom of this!
Tags: 2010, enumerators, ID badges, Identity Theft
April 8th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
[...] would not know from other media reports about the census what employees wear or what their flimsy ID badges look like. In the opinion of MyTwoCensus, this ban on the media violates the first amendment that gives [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] deal with hostile individuals/animals/situations. Also, MyTwoCensus has previously reported, since Census Bureau employees lack uniforms and formal photo ID badges, they can be more easily targeted by individuals who suspect that someone is trespassing on their [...]
June 13th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Census employee’s ID numbers are not written on their ID badges. The identification looks bogus and only ‘permanent / management’ employees have their photograph on them.
April 1st, 2010 at 7:22 pm
What people need to do is not open the door to people claiming to be from the Census Bureau. I was thinking of making my own Census ID to show anyone knocking at my door to prove anyone can claim to be from the Bureau. But I’m afraid that I would be arrested for doing that.
Needless to say, my door isn’t going to be opened for anyone claiming to be from that office.
April 27th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
I was recently hired by the census, and was kind of surprised by the ID given us. It is a simple card with no photograph, and with my name filled in with a marker. It looks like the kind of thing you could easily make at home. While I understand that computers now allow crooks to make even photo ID badges pretty easily, it is crazy to make the job so simple for them. About the only defense that the housholder really has is to demand a name and nunber of the local office and then call them for verification. I suspect that a part of the half-assedness of this, is beacause the field offices only do this once every ten years, and have to get it all done relatively quickly with a very small permenenat staff.
May 2nd, 2010 at 2:33 am
[...] that we will likely encounter at many other places in coming months. For more than a year now, MyTwoCensus has been concerned that the dinky canvass tote bags and non-photo IDs of Census Bureau e… do not serve as proper identification of government [...]
October 9th, 2010 at 7:18 am
I wanted to know what measures did the census worked on to remedy the problem… Forging is becoming a common problem and we have to admit that they are so brilliant in forging thing especially IDs. What is so annoying is that they really take advantage of it.