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from Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, February 28, 2003

Within five years automatic teller machines will be scanning eyes before handing out the cash.

It is just one of the measures to thwart identity theft, the fastest growing crime in Australia.

Personal details such as bank accounts, birth certificates and credit information are stolen and used by imposters to apply for bank loans or credit cards, or to disguise a criminal record. Identity theft is estimated by the Attorney-General to cost $4 billion a year in Australia.

"It is fast becoming the boom crime of the next decade," said Macquarie Bank's head of banking and property, Bill Moss.

The bank yesterday launched a consumer guide to avoiding identity theft. It advises people to take more care in how they dispose of bank statements, bills and receipts, to put locks on their mailboxes and take mail to a post office instead of using on-street post boxes.

Ian Keddie, a company director, became a victim of an identity fraud six months ago.

"The first I knew of it was when I got a statement for a new Gold Visa card, it was in my name and had an impressive credit limit. I thought it was a printing error until I noticed about $10,000 had been withdrawn via ATMs across Australia," he said.

He called his bank, ANZ, to alert them and was told it was one of 22 similar cases.

According to Mr Moss the widespread use of biometric technologies will be an inevitable result of identity theft.

Biometric technologies use unique attributes of the human body to identify individuals far more reliably than is possible with passwords or driving licences.

John Grimes, of iris scanning company Argus Solutions, said the technology was already used in automatic tellers in Britain and America and "within the next five years will become commonplace in Australia".

The one dissenting voice in the charge towards biometric security was the head of the NSW Fraud Squad, Megan McGowan.

"Once someone acquires your fingerprint and finds a way to use it, what do you do? You can't ask the bank to issue a new finger."

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