::A Geek in Korea::

My wife has now officially gotten aboard the "Online Shopping" experience. She spent the entire day yesterday looking for deals. I needed to get a new memory card, so she spent time looking for the cheapest items with the best service and features. She went to Auction.co.kr for the first time, which happens to be the largest site of it’s kind in Korea. It’s the standard for auction sites in Korea, and was purchased by the American giant eBay a few years ago. The problem was that when she went to create an Identity on the site for the first time, it said that she had already been a member for four years.

She didn’t start shopping online until last month or so, and didn’t even have a debt card four years ago. There is no way she could have been the person that had signed up for an online auction site. There is no way she could have paid for anything she bought. She did a search to find out who was registered using her Korean identity number. It turns out, it was an old Ex-boyfriend of hers. She recognized his email address. He had signed up using her personal information months after they had broken up.

She gave him a call and chewed him a new ear. Whatever he had done using her personal information, he claimed he didn’t remember. She said she was going to call the Cyber Police if he didn’t immediately delete the account. The Cyber Police are a group of police officers dedicated to fighting online crime and identity theft in Korea that track down scam artists and crooks.

The Korean Identity number, which is a unique number given to Korean people like the American Social Security number, is used by most websites as a personal identification to prove who you are. While having a way to positively identify someone online is a good idea for commerce and accountability, it has it’s downsides. Once a website has been compromised, or someone gets hold of your information, it’s much too simple to sign up and abuse such a system.

While her ex-boyfriend might have simply forgotten that he had signed up with her details sometime in the past, we don’t know if there was any malicious intent behind his actions. He claimed that if anything bad came from the result of using her name long ago, he would take full responsibility. He has since deleted the account.

Luckily for us it was someone we could directly contact and deal with, instead of a stranger that we wouldn’t be able to track down and could abuse the situation. Considering the amount of time I spend online, it’s a scary proposition to think of all the potentially abusable personal information floating around at people’s disposal. Having to deal with a privacy issue first hand is frightening and maddening.