The Identity Theft Council

The Identity Theft Council is founded on a simple premise - that every community, no matter how small, has resources that can be harnessed to combat identity theft: to help victims recover from the crime, to ease the burden on law enforcement, and to educate users about the many options they have to avoid the crime.

Our mission is to find more effective ways to fight identity theft at a local level, and we hope to achieve this in a number of ways:

• By providing victims of identity theft with free access to local experts and trained counselors who are volunteering their time to help victims recover from identity theft.

• By working with local credit unions and banks to encourage their employees to become trained volunteer identity theft counselors.

• By partnering with law enforcement, providing them with free training and other resources, so they can provide a more positive response to victims.

• By working with a broad network of local partners, including the financial community, law enforcement, local government, local businesses, and schools, to spread the "prevention through education" message to the broader community.

• By creating Junior Identity Theft Councils in schools across the country so that students can learn about the risks early, take the prevention message into their community, and learn valuable life and job skills.

Established in early 2010 in the San Francisco Bay area, the Identity Theft Council (ITC) is a non-profit, grassroots organization that provides identity theft victims with free, ongoing support and identity recovery assistance in their local communities. The Council is creating a nationwide network of local partnerships between law enforcement, the financial industry, and volunteers in local communities to provide hands-on support for victims of identity theft, help law enforcement provide a more coordinated response, and improve identity theft education and awareness community by community, across the country.

The Council's current national initiative is called Operation Stop IT! - Stop Identity Theft - supported by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Credit Union National Association, Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), the American Bankers Association, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), Elder Financial Protection Network (EFPN), and the Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC). For more information or to become involved in the Identity Theft Council, please visit: http://www.identitytheftcouncil.org/.