Identity Theft Protection: An editorial by Steven Lawrence, Publisher, South Pasadenan News
Every week, this paper publishes the South Pasadena Police Department’s crime report. I read each one before it goes live. And every week, similar patterns surface — auto theft on quiet residential blocks, garage break-ins on streets where neighbors thought nothing ever happened, residential burglaries committed in broad daylight on the 1000 block of Meridian, the 2000 block of Fremont, the 1500 block of Huntington. We are not a sleepy suburb. We are a high-value target, geographically wedged between Pasadena, San Marino, Alhambra, Highland Park, and the freeways that move criminals in and out of our neighborhoods in under 10 minutes.
That is the physical threat. The digital threat is worse, and for most residents of the South Pasadena/Pasadena Metro area it is invisible until the moment it happens to you, or someone close to you.
I’m writing this editorial because the conversations I’ve had in recent months — at council meetings, at the Farmers’ Market, in the offices of business owners up and down Mission Street and Fair Oaks — have been telling me something. People in this town, and across San Marino, La Cañada, El Sereno, Hermon, Highland Park, and the LA-adjacent neighborhoods we serve, are getting hit – harder than ever. Identity theft is big business for fraudsters. IRS refund fraud. Mistaken-identity collections. Phantom credit accounts opened in their names. Home-invasion crews casing properties they’ve apparently researched online before ever setting foot on the street, and more.
There is now a playbook and some apparatus for fighting back. It involves a new California law that took effect ten weeks ago, a handful of paid services that have proven to be worth their cost, and a set of free actions that most residents could complete this weekend. This editorial is that playbook.
The Scale of What We’re Dealing With
Before the how, the why. Because residents who don’t believe identity theft is a real and present threat in our specific zip codes will not spend a Saturday afternoon dealing with it.
California is the worst state in the country for identity theft by absolute numbers. In just the first three quarters of 2025, California received 135,575 identity theft reports — already at 97% of 2024’s full-year total of 139,665. That works out to roughly 497 new victims every single day across the state, with one new victim every 2.9 minutes around the clock.
That’s the state. Now narrow the lens.
The Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim metropolitan area ranks #6 nationally among all metros for identity theft, with 550 reports per 100,000 residents and 71,624 total reports. Our metro area is the sixth-worst in the United States. San Francisco–Oakland, by comparison, ranks #100. San Diego ranks #60. We are not in their company. We are in a category of our own.
Why? Multiple factors converge to create the elevated risk: massive population creating scale, high cost of living attracting high-value targets, technology industry concentration creating sophisticated fraud schemes, and extensive online commerce creating digital vulnerabilities. In plain English: criminals follow the money, and the money is here. The same factors that make South Pasadena, San Marino, La Cañada, and adjacent communities desirable places to live and run businesses also make us preferred hunting grounds for fraud rings that have professionalized in ways most residents do not understand.
The national numbers reinforce the local picture. The FTC received 1,135,270 identity theft reports in 2024, a 9.5% increase from 2023. Combined identity fraud and scam losses totaled $38 billion in 2025, affecting 36 million victims. Someone in the United States becomes a victim of identity theft approximately every 4.9 seconds, and an estimated 22% of Americans experience identity theft at some point in their lives. One in five.
Within California, residents aged 30 to 49 have the highest reporting rates — 166 to 168 per 100,000 — representing peak earning years with substantial credit activity. California’s high-income tech workers, entertainment industry professionals, and business owners in this age range are prime targets. If you fit that demographic — and a significant percentage of our readers do — you are not a hypothetical victim. You are a probable one.
And here is the finding that should change how every reader of this paper thinks about prevention: Only 28% of identity theft victims in 2025 were victimized once. The remaining 72% were hit more than once. When your information enters criminal markets, it circulates indefinitely. One incident is rarely the end of the story.
The crime statistics for our own city tell a parallel story on the physical side. Pasadena has a crime rate of 31 per one thousand residents, with one’s chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime at one in 32. More than 90% of California communities have a lower crime rate than Pasadena. The chance of being a victim of property crime is one in 38. South Pasadena fares better in absolute terms but the police department’s own weekly reports document residential burglaries with troubling regularity, often in the middle of the afternoon and often after the suspect has clearly researched the target.
The two threats are no longer separate. The fraud rings that buy your data online sell it to the burglary crews who decide which house to hit. The address aggregation sites that publish your home address, square footage, floor plan, and recent purchase history are functionally a shopping catalog for organized property crime. If we are going to take our safety seriously in this region, we have to take both ends of the pipeline seriously at the same time.
The New Law Most Californians Don’t Know About Yet
California’s most important consumer-privacy development in a generation went live on January 1, 2026, with almost no public fanfare. Most residents of the Pasadena Metro have never heard of it. Most have not used it. Every adult reading this editorial should.
It’s called DROP — the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform — and it is run by CalPrivacy, the California Privacy Protection Agency. DROP lets you send a single request to over 500 registered data brokers. Starting August 1, 2026, data brokers must delete your data within 90 days.
In other words: instead of contacting every people-search and data-aggregator site individually — a process that can take months and which most people abandon halfway through — you submit one verified request to the state, and the state forwards it to every registered broker in California. The brokers are legally obligated to comply.
Consumers residing in California can start submitting deletion requests now. Data brokers will be required to process them starting August 1, 2026. After that date, they must retrieve DROP requests at least every 45 days, determine and act on deletion requests within 90 days, treat unresolved deletion requests as opt-out requests at minimum, and maintain suppression lists to ensure personal information is not re-collected or resold.
Enforcement is real. Penalties of $200 per request per day begin August 1, 2026, for failure to process deletion requests. A single large data broker that misses a deletion cycle is looking at over a billion dollars in theoretical exposure. The state has already taken enforcement actions against unregistered brokers within days of the platform’s launch.
The submission process is free. Check out privacy.ca.gov/drop, verify California residency, provide basic identifying information, and submit. (Careful not to get frustrated at this part if it takes a few minutes – the system is designed to absolutely verify that it’s you making the requests). You can choose to send the request to all registered brokers or to select specific ones. The state retains nothing beyond what’s needed to process the request. There is no excuse — no expense, no complexity — for any adult in California not to do this.
A few realistic caveats. The program applies only to data brokers registered in California. It does not automatically extend to brokers operating in other states or internationally. Plenty of bottom-feeder people-search sites either are not registered or operate from jurisdictions outside the state’s reach. DROP is a force multiplier, not a magic eraser. But it is the single most powerful free tool any California resident has ever had to reduce their digital footprint.
The Paid Services Worth Considering
DROP handles the registered brokers. Paid services handle almost everything else — and, critically, they re-submit your removal requests on an ongoing basis when brokers quietly rebuild your profile from new sources, which they do constantly. Data broker sites comply with your opt-out request, wait a few months, and quietly reassemble your information from other sources. This is why removal services are sold as continuous subscriptions, not one-time scrubs.
After reviewing the independent testing data from multiple 2026 consumer-security publications, three services consistently lead the field.
Before I name them, a disclosure that matters: The South Pasadenan News has no affiliation, partnership, sponsorship, referral arrangement, or financial relationship of any kind with any of the services discussed in this editorial. No service has paid for placement. No service has provided complimentary subscriptions, advertising consideration, or anything else of value to this paper, to me personally, or to any member of our staff. This is not a paid advertisement and it is not native advertising. The recommendations that follow are the product of independent research into publicly available 2026 testing data, nothing more. I am naming these companies because the evidence points where it points, and from direct experience. Oh, and most importantly: nothing’s perfect, but these are the services that are the best according to our research.
DeleteMe is the most thorough option for individuals and families. DeleteMe covers 850+ data broker sites — the highest raw number of any service tested — using an entirely manual approach where real people submit removal requests, targeting the highest-priority, highest-risk sites first. It runs slower than automated competitors but more thoroughly, with what one independent review described as a “white-glove service” feel. DeleteMe supports adding spouses and family members on higher-tier plans — a meaningful feature for households where every adult needs coverage. Expect roughly $130 per person per year, more for family plans.
Incogni is the most efficient automated option. It covers over 420 data broker sites and offers unlimited custom removal requests on the Premium plan. In head-to-head testing, Incogni found 129 records in the first week — far faster than manual services. At roughly $8 to $15 per month, Incogni is the right choice for residents who want speed and broad automated coverage without premium pricing.
Aura is the right pick only if you also need active identity-theft protection bundled with removal. Aura covers 133+ broker sites — fewer than the specialists — but adds credit monitoring, dark web scanning, up to $5 million in identity theft insurance on family plans, a VPN, and antivirus in one plan. The distinction matters: DeleteMe and Incogni remove your data. Neither helps you when your data has already been found and someone is using it. Aura’s job starts where the others’ job ends.
A fourth service worth knowing about for residents who want verifiable proof of work: Optery. Optery’s scanning technology uncovers profiles on over 1,120 sites and provides live before-and-after screenshots as proof of removals — undeniable evidence rather than vague dashboard claims.
My honest recommendation for a typical Pasadena Metro household: file the free DROP request today, then look at subscribing to DeleteMe for every adult in the home, and pair it with a dedicated identity-monitoring service — either Aura’s bundle or a standalone product like LifeLock — if you have prior identity-theft history, run a business, or hold the kind of professional position that makes you a high-value target. Combined annual cost: roughly $300 to $500 per adult. Given that the median identity-theft victim loses hundreds of hours and substantial money resolving a single incident, the math on the benefit of doing the ‘game-plan’ is not close.
What You Can Do Yourself, This Weekend, Free
For residents who would rather do the work themselves — or who want to layer DIY action on top of a paid service — here is a realistic plan that any reasonably motivated adult can complete in a weekend.
See about filing your DROP request: Verify your identity and California residency. Submit. Do it for every adult in the household. This is the single highest-leverage free action available to any California resident in 2026 that we could find.
Manually opt out of the highest-traffic people-search sites. The first page of Google results for your name is dominated by perhaps a dozen sites. Hitting those by hand removes most of what casual searchers — including criminals doing reconnaissance — actually see. The sites worth your time: Whitepages, Spokeo, BeenVerified, Radaris, MyLife, TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch, PeopleFinder, Intelius, Nuwber, and Been Verified. Each opt-out takes between five and fifteen minutes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Reports both publish free, current step-by-step guides for each site.
Use Google’s “Results About You” tool. Inside your Google account settings, this feature flags search results containing your home address, phone number, or email, and lets you submit removal requests directly to Google. Removal is not guaranteed for every result, but the success rate is high for personal contact information.
Freeze your credit at all three bureaus. Free, takes about fifteen minutes per bureau (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion), and effectively blocks the most common form of identity theft — fraudulent new-account opening. You can temporarily lift the freeze when you need to apply for credit yourself. There is no reason any adult who isn’t actively applying for credit should not have all three freezes in place.
Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN. Free. Issued by the IRS. Stops the single most common form of tax fraud — someone filing a fraudulent return in your name to steal your refund — cold. Apply at irs.gov/IPPIN. This is a five-minute action that closes one of the most painful and bureaucratically miserable forms of identity theft outright.
Re-check everything every three to six months. This is the part most people drop. Set a calendar reminder. The data brokers do not stop, and neither should you.
The Real Estate Problem No Realtor Wants to Discuss
I’m going to talk about something most local real estate professionals would prefer this paper not address.
When a home sells in our area, the listing agent uploads photographs, floor plans, interior shots, room-by-room detail, and often drone footage to the regional Multiple Listing Service. From there, the data flows to Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, Trulia, Homes.com, Movoto, Estately, Rocket Homes, Compass, and dozens of smaller aggregators. The buyer closes. The listing is marked “sold.” The photos stay up forever.
For new homeowners in South Pasadena, San Marino, La Cañada, and surrounding communities, this represents a serious and almost universally ignored security exposure. A motivated criminal can look at the listing for a recently-sold home and see exactly which window is the primary bedroom, where the alarm panel is mounted, which doors are solid-core and which are glass, where the safe might plausibly be, and which rooms have visible high-value items. The floor plan is the most dangerous artifact of all. It is a literal blueprint for entry.
Most new homeowners assume their real estate agent removes this material after closing. That’s typically not the case. Real estate agents can also use the information to post their listings on social media and other online outlets. The photographs are a marketing asset for the agent’s portfolio. Removal is not automatic, and is often actively discouraged.
Here is the procedure for removing your home from these sites.
Start at the source — the MLS. Only licensed agents and brokers can access an MLS and make changes, such as removal. Whether you’re a buyer or seller, ask your listing agent to close out the listing on the MLS. You want two specific actions: mark the listing closed/sold *and* remove the photographs and floor plans from the MLS record entirely. Most agents will do the first by default and not the second unless asked. In Los Angeles County, the main MLS systems are CRMLS and TheMLS — your agent will know which.
Claim ownership on each major aggregator. Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com all offer “claim your home” flows for verified owners. Once claimed, you can directly delete photographs, hide the listing history, and request removal from search results. Trulia is owned by Zillow and generally inherits Zillow changes. Each platform takes between ten and thirty minutes.
Push the smaller aggregators in writing. Homes.com, Movoto, Estately, Rocket Homes, Compass, and others each have their own contact procedures. A short email — “I am the verified owner of this property. Please remove all photographs, floor plans, and interior details immediately for documented safety reasons” — typically works within one to two weeks. If a site stalls, citing California Civil Code §1708.85 in your follow-up tends to move things along.
Clear Google’s image cache. Even after photos come down from the source sites, Google may continue showing cached versions for weeks. Google’s “Remove Outdated Content” tool accepts submissions for each cached URL and processes them in a few days.
Blur the exterior on every map service. Google Maps Street View accepts blur requests through the “report a problem” interface. Apple Maps accepts requests through its “report an issue” function. Bing Maps has its own “report a concern” flow. Each map service uses different satellite imagery, so blurring on one does not affect the others.
If you have to triage, kill the floor plans first. They are the most valuable single piece of intelligence a burglar can have about a target home, and they are the artifact that the major real estate sites are most willing to remove when asked.
What All This Adds Up To
Losses have grown at an average rate of approximately 27% per year — a sustained, structural escalation rather than a temporary spike.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” ~Benjamin Franklin
The plan, in summary:
File a free DROP request online this week. Subscribe to DeleteMe or Incogni for every adult in your household if it works for you. Layer on Aura or LifeLock if you have prior identity-theft history or run a business. Freeze your credit at all three bureaus. Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN. If you’ve recently purchased a home, get on the phone with your listing agent tomorrow morning and start the MLS removal process (It sucks, and they hate it).
I suppose that we protect this community by knowing what’s coming, and by refusing to make it easy.
Steven Lawrence is the publisher of the South Pasadenan News, which serves the South Pasadena/Pasadena Metro areas and surrounding Los Angeles–adjacent communities.
Reader resources are deemed “use at your own risk”. This news website nor it’s staff have no affiliation or control of any third-party links or businesses mentioned in this article. As always: do your own research and decide what fits the best for your situation.
