Financial institutions and other credit-card issuers would be required to truncate or partially obliterate a customer's account number on receipts under a new Senate bill.
The requirement, just one of several in the Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2001, (S-1399) would add the force of law behind a growing industry practice of just printing the last four numbers of a credit account on a customer's receipt and including fraud alerts in monthly billing statements to account holders.
The bill would require all new credit-card machines "to truncate any credit card number on a customer's receipt," and would force companies to retro-fit existing machines within four years. It would also require credit grantors to verify the address of credit account seekers or change of address requests in addition to verifying requests for additional credit cards.
Those requirements, according to the bill's sponsors, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); Richard Shelby (R-AL); Jon Corzine (D-NJ); Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), are "common-sense measures" designed to force the credit-granting industry to "take some practical steps to protect sensitive personal financial information" to help combat identity theft.
Feinstein said it was both appropriate and necessary for credit grantors to take those steps because they "have a responsibility to prevent fraudsters from using their services to harm the good name of other citizens [who] simply protect their good name on their own."
It was noted that the bill, one of 11 privacy measures awaiting action by several House and Senate committees, would expand the privacy protections of several existing federal laws including the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Financial Services Modernization Act.
The FBI estimates that the identities of some 350,000 people are stolen every year while the Federal Trade Commission, which would gain the authority to take civil actions against credit grantors for violating the measure's requirements, predicts the number will double by the end of next year.
