This is an identity theft alert. Petitions are being circulated door-to-door and at public locations throughout the county that require your name, your address and your signature. The State of Michigan does not require a license or bond for signature gatherers and anyone can collect signatures regardless of their police record.

Be very careful who you give your personal information to, particularly your signature. In many cases, copies of these petitions, with your signature, are sent overseas for processing. Be on the alert for fraudulent attempts to get your personal information.

While the call does not identify who paid for it, the number has been linked to Republican robo-call operations in Michigan and beyond. The identity of the owner of the line is unknown.

On television it’s hard to miss the wildly popular band of slackers singing ruefully from a shabby apartment or while waiting tables in pirate regalia. The ruined credit that led to their financial misfortune might have been sparkling if only they’d tracked their status on freecreditreport.com.

The Federal Trade Commission is not amused. It has long believed that the company that owns freecreditreport.com is deliberately diverting people from a government-mandated site where consumers can get free credit reports by law, and using the reports as a lure for a $14.95 monthly service that alerts subscribers to important changes in their credit status.

The government even has put together a spoof video of those popular ads, with singers letting consumers know they can check their credit reports for free. But beyond the ads, the story explains, is the $1 billion credit monitoring industry, which allows consumers to check for real-time changes to their reports. With the exception of identity theft victims, few consumers have a need for that kind of monitoring. And if they do, they can check their credit themselves, without charge, several times a year.

The problem is that some consumers sign up unwittingly for these monitoring services, thinking they’re getting a one-time free credit score check, and finding themselves instead locked into a monthly fee as high as $30. And such services are peddled not just by those freecreditreport.com singers, but by the big three credit bureaus and major credit card companies.

The fact that consumers are signing up — and paying — for services they can get for free from the government tells you a lot about the state of financial literacy in this country. Our story mentioned car title dealers, payday lenders and other fringe banking services that cater mostly to low- and moderate-income consumers. But the Times story makes clear financial literacy knows no income boundaries, with consumers being tripped up by mainstream lenders as well. Magic Johnson isn’t the only celebrity endorsing predatory businesses, like Rent-A-Center. Former New York Times Sunday Business columnist Ben Stein got fired after doing commercials for a shady credit reporting company.

Good luck to the government trying to educate consumers about this. It won’t be easy. When I called up the New York Times piece to write this post, all kinds of ads for free credit scores and credit monitoring companies popped up on my screen. And as we mentioned, financial literacy efforts in this country often don’t come just from the government or other unbiased sources, but from corporations and lenders with a stake in the game.

Visa, for example, announced recently its goal of helping 20 million people worldwide with financial literacy skills, attracting some positive publicity for the effort. Wonder if the advice will include paying off your credit card balance in its entirety each month, or, better yet, avoiding the plastic altogether.

After studying Medicaid claims in five states — California, New York, North Carolina, Illinois and Texas — GAO found more than 1,800 cases, between fiscal years 2006 and 2007, when Medicaid paid to fill controlled substance prescriptions for patients who had already died. The tab totaled more than $200,000, GAO said.

Additionally, GAO found, Medicaid paid more than $500,000 in those same states to filled similar prescriptions “written” by more than 1,200 physicians who had died beforehand.

Some of the most commonly abused medications, GAO found, included OxyContin, Ambien, Ritalin and Valium.

The report worked its way into today’s health reform debate in the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), the panel’s senior Republican, said the findings were clear indication that identity theft is a problem in Medicaid. Grassley was urging passage of his amendment requiring potential Medicaid patients to show photo IDs in order to enroll in the program.  No dead person, Grassley argued, can produce an ID.

But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), a former state attorney general, countered that the Medicaid fraud involving dead folks most often originates with providers trying to get paid for nothing, not patients trying to get free care. “The fraud in Medicaid is provider fraud,” Bingaman said.

The Grassley measure failed along party lines.

Well, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is indignant.

“Do you feel better knowing that it’s legal for an illegal alien to steal your identity if he or she doesn’t know it’s yours?” he asked his audience Monday night.

Surprise –  97 percent of Dobbs’ viewers responded that no, they did not feel better knowing that.

Never mind that Figheroa was convicted of entering the U.S. illegally, and for misusing immigration documents — all of which he did intentionally do. Also, his conviction would have also been upheld for identity theft if he’d known that the fake documents reflected any existing person’s identity – he didn’t have to know whose.

Here’s how Justice Samuel Alito – no flaming liberal – explained the problem with the contrary position, which Dobbs apparently supports:

Under that [the government’s] interpretation, if a defendant uses a made-up Social Security number without having any reason to know whether it belongs to a real person, the defendant’s liability under §1028A(a)(1) depends on chance: If it turns out that the number belongs to a real person, two years will be added to the defendant’s sentence, but if the defendant is lucky and the number does not belong to another person, the statute is not violated.

In other words, conviction would depend on luck rather than criminal intent — which is, after all, an element of the crime.

Lucky for Dobbs it’s not a crime to intentionally mislead your television audience.

The case arose, at such cases usually do, in the context of an undocumented worker, Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, who submitted false documents to an employer to get a job. After his employer reported him, the government discovered that the social security number was real, only it was somebody else’s.  The government charged Flores-Figheroa with entering the United States illegally, misusing immigration documents, and identity theft.

He was convicted, and Flores-Figheroa appealed the identity theft charge, claiming he didn’t know the number he had belonged to anybody at all.  The court upheld the conviction anyway.

Today, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that law, which requires that the offender “knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person” means exactly that — that the offender must know that he did it.

The full opinion is here.