There appear to be different classes of identity theft. What I am currently experiencing is someone using my credit card credentials and my name in a very disposable fashion – i.e. for one-off gain, and not caring at all about who I might even be. This has left me with a tarnished reputation online, and presumably those who used my name have escaped without detection, and will not need to use my details again, although you never know.
I will update this page to summarise first of all what happened, and secondly the progress made. Various blog posts will cover the process and detail of Reclaiming My Name.
Targetted search engines
The search engines I would like to clean up the results on are Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and DuckDuckGo. These are the top 4 search engines (see EbizMBA and SEO consultants) plus one I have taken an interest in.
Summary of current results is on this post.
Method employed
The approach to resolving the identity theft fallout has been two-fold. Firstly, asking for my name to be removed or the content to be amended, and secondly ramping up a web presence to push the offending material down the search order. The second part involved not only creating the material, but exercising some search engine optimisation techniques to improve the rank of the fresh new content. Bear in mind that every extra web presence created is another maintenance task to keep it both current and above the other results.