Compliance Alert

New Jersey’s Acting Gov. Richard Codey has signed three bills—A4001/S1914, A2768 and A2769/S2617—into law that aim to give consumers protection against identity theft.

Bill A4001/S1914, or the "New Jersey Identity Theft Prevention Act," enables consumers to request that credit reporting agencies place a security freeze on their consumer credit reports and allows consumers to file and to receive a copy of police reports concerning suspected identity theft. The law also requires any company that lawfully collects and maintains computerized records containing consumers’ personal information to notify affected consumers in the event that personal data is compromised and limits the use of consumers’ Social Security numbers as an identifier, prohibiting public display and usage of the numbers on printed materials, except where required by law. The New Jersey Identity Theft Prevention Act, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2006, also requires businesses to destroy no-longer-needed records that contain a customer’s personal information.

Bill A2769/S2617 protects consumers against the unauthorized capture of their credit or ATM card information. The new measure prohibits the unauthorized use of scanning devices or re-encoders to access or to scan the encoded information on any ATM, debit, credit or other payment card. The bill also makes it a crime to use a re-encoder to place the information encoded on the magnetic strip onto a different card without the permission of the cardholder. A re-encoder is a device that places encoded information from the magnetic strip of a payment card onto the magnetic strip or stripe of a different payment card. The law went into effect immediately.

Bill A2768 will expand the state’s identity theft laws to include the sale, manufacture, possession or exhibit of false birth certificates. The measure will make it a second-degree crime to sell, offer to sell or to possess with the intent to sell a forged birth certificate. Convictions will be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $150,000 in fines. The statute for forging a birth certificate would be consistent with punishment for manufacturing a false driver’s license or other government documents. The law went into effect immediately.