Embarrassing ID frauds hit the rich and famous

- Check your credit report for ID fraud
- World's richest entertainers

Few things link a pop singer, several premiership footballers and three comedians – but identity fraud is one of them.

Lily Allen, Alistair McGowan, Ricky Gervais, Harry Hill and a clutch of first-rank soccer players have either lost serious amounts of money after being impersonated by criminals or come within a whisker of losing a substantial sum.

You would have thought people who appear in commercials about identity fraud would think twice about the safety of their personal data. Not Alistair McGowan.

He was advertising a credit card identity protection service when he threw the unwanted contents of his wallet into a bin, thinking that would be the last of it.

Instead, everything was picked out by national newspaper reporters checking up on whether he followed his own tv advert advice. They found his debit card – which was valid for four months – his membership card for the actor’s union, Equity, and an insurance card. This was more than enough to mount a major identity fraud.

"It is embarrassing and will teach me to be more careful in the future," said McGowan. "It is very important to destroy material that contains personal information."

A stripper managed to get hold of Lily Allen’s personal details and, in particular, her taxi cab account details and password. The erotic artiste then promptly pretended to be Allen and the taxi company took her to and from strip clubs for weeks, running up a huge bill. Extraordinarily, nobody queried why a popular young singer was going to down-at-heel strip joints night after night.

"One of my biggest luxuries in life is taking cabs," said Allen. "Then I found out a stripper had stolen my details and run up a £3,500 bill. She was using my taxi firm to drop her off for work at her strip club every night – and charging me." The stripper has not been caught.

And fraudsters don't ever need genuine material or details to cause problems. Thieves cut a picture of Ricky Gervais from the back of a DVD box and stuck it into a fake passport. That was enough to siphon almost £200,000 from his bank account. The thieves had planned to convert the cash into gold bars using the false Gervais identity but were thwarted by a suspicious bullion dealer. He could not believe the comedian would ever buy that much gold and called the police.

Meanwhile, the first thing Harry Hill knew about £280,000 being taken out of his bank accounts was when he visited his local branch to query strange transactions on one of his accounts. Only then did staff realise that he had been the victim of a huge fraud. The criminals had obtained personal information about him and set up online accounts to plunder his cash and then disappear.

Chelsea’s Didier Drogba, Michael Essien and Salomon Kalou, Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboue and Kolo Toure, Tottenham’s Didier Zokora, Liverpool’s Momo Sissoko and Manchester United’s Manucho were all put at great risk of identity fraud.

Some bright spark at the African Cup of Nations decided it would be fun for the fans to know the passport numbers of every player in the tournament – so they were all put up on the official web site.

As other web sites feature football players’ dates of birth and other personal details, making confidential data such as passport numbers public was like giving half a bank vault combination to a thief – who will soon work out the rest. Fortunately, the gaffe was spotted quickly and the numbers removed.

It’s not just British stars who are vulnerable. Steven Speilberg, financial guru George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Oracle computer boss Larry Ellison, Robert de Niro, Tiger Woods, Will Smith and Jennifer Lopez have all been victims of identity crimes costing tens of millions of dollars.

Speilberg, Soros, Ellison and Winfrey were victims of a trainee dishwasher who cleaned up more than £10 million from theirs and others’ accounts just by using a magazine rich list and internet research. It was enough to open online bank accounts in their names and siphon off money from the victims’ real accounts.

Robert DeNiro was hit by a smaller fraud. His wife’s maid borrowed her employer’s credit card and passed herself off as Mrs DeNiro, Grace Hightower, to buy upmarket clothing. The maid claimed she did it because she was not treated with respect.

The Tiger Woods case was similar – his name was used to buy some £25,000 of goods and services. It was the thief’s third offence and is now serving life under California’s three-strike law. Another felon used Will Smith’s name to open 14 credit accounts at Pittsburgh stores, while J-Lo found her mail diverted by thieves to gain personal information, with which they opened false accounts.

If it can happen to the rich and famous, it can happen to any of us. Celebrity identity fraud victims should have followed some simple guidelines to stop the criminals in their tracks – or prevent the frauds happening in the first place.

You can do better:

• Check your credit report regularly, as the Home Office advises. Your credit report is the personal history of your credit, from cards to loans, mortgages and even utility and mobile phone accounts. Changes to your report can alert you to any attempt at identity fraud.
• Shred documents containing personal information before throwing them away.
• Cut up old credit and debit cards before binning them.
• Never give away personal data, such as your bank or card account details, to strangers, cold callers, or in e-mails.
• Always memorise your PINs and passwords and never share them. Do not keep them with payment cards or bank account information.
• Don’t carry important documents, such as your passport or driving licence, unless you need them – thieves could use them to steal your ID.
• Restrict the amount of information you publish about yourself on social networking sites that could be used by fraudsters to build your personal profile.
• If you are moving, have mail forwarded for at least a year. Report missing post as soon as you are aware of it – identity thieves could be diverting it.

You can check your Experian credit report for free with a 30-day trial of CreditExpert. You can see your report as often as you like and will be alerted by text or e-mail if there is a change to your credit report that could indicate an attempt at identity fraud.