Bellevue, WA-based Finsphere has added $7.3 million in fundraising and a board member from Vodafone Ventures, according to a new SEC filing. The new money, which appears to include the sale and exercise of some options, adds to a total of $3.95 million that Finsphere raised in related equity financings last year.

Finsphere, founded in 2007, is headed by veterans of the wireless and finance industries. It offers software and data analysis services that use consumer mobile phones for identity verification, with an emphasis on helping banks and other financial providers track fraud and identity theft. Finsphere also offers a slimmed-down version of its financial-fraud protections for consumers, called Pinpoint.

The apparent investment from Vodafone Ventures is significant—it’s the venture arm of Vodafone, a huge U.K.-based mobile operator. The new Finsphere board member is Vodafone Ventures director Tobin Ireland, a tech-industry veteran whose previous work includes a stint as chief marketing officer at AOL.

This latest chunk of money brings Finsphere’s venture investment total to about $30 million. Previous investors are Bezos Expeditions, Frazier Technology Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. I’ve e-mailed Finsphere for comment on the latest SEC filing and will update if I hear more.

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San Diego authorities have charged a 59-year-old man with identity theft, saying he unlawfully transferred $7.5 million from a Deutsche Bank account by posing as the actual account holder—a retired San Diego biotech executive and angel investor who was found dead on June 8.

San Diego police also are investigating the death of the executive, John G. Watson, as a possible homicide. Watson, who was 65, was a board member at the San Diego Tech Coast Angels and active with Connect, the San Diego nonprofit program for technology and entrepreneurship.

Police arrested Kent Keigwin, 59, on June 11 after he showed up at Watson’s residential unit on Camino Del Oro in La Jolla, according to Deputy District Attorney Sharla Evert. Police investigators, who were in Watson’s home searching for evidence, already knew that someone posing as Watson had transferred $7.5 million to a Scottrade account that was opened in Watson’s name, Evert says.

Keigwin had been representing himself as a financial advisor to the “entrepreneur and investor community” in San Diego, Evert says. Keigwin pleaded innocent to identity theft and related felony fraud charges at a June 15 arraignment. His bail was set at $2.5 million, and Evert says he remains in jail.

Police homicide Lt. Kevin Rooney told me yesterday that investigators are awaiting a formal determination on the cause of Watson’s death by the San Diego County Medical Examiner.

As I reported last week, Watson’s body was found on the floor of his bedroom on the evening of June 8 after he failed to appear for the San Diego Tech Coast Angels’ regular board meeting and dinner event at the UC San Diego faculty club. Watson was expected to serve as the event’s master of ceremonies and fellow board members, who were alarmed and concerned by his absence, found his body. It was unknown how long he had been dead, but TCA members told me Watson had not responded to e-mails sent days before the event.

Evert says the new account in Watson’s name appears to have been opened the previous day, on June 7.

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The DEMOfall 09 conference, billed as “the launchpad for emerging technology,” kicks off today in San Diego, with company presentations and new product launches officially starting tomorrow morning. The Seattle and Portland, OR, metro areas are well-represented in the mix, with three Seattle-area startups and one Portland company scheduled to present their stuff. That’s all according to VentureBeat, which co-produces the conference.

It’s a big deal in the tech industry, and a great opportunity for a select group of startups. Here’s a little bit about each Northwest company that will take the stage:

—Intelius, based in Bellevue, WA, provides background checks and identity theft protection for consumers and businesses. Back in May, we reported that the company acquired Spock, the Silicon Valley-based people search engine, for an undisclosed amount. Intelius was founded in 2003 and is led by CEO Naveen Jain, the founder of InfoSpace.

—Point of Wealth Systems, based in Portland, OR, has developed a method that allows employees who make their money in cash and tips (waitstaff at restaurants, for example) to deposit their earnings into a secure register for savings, retirement, or investment purposes. Point of Wealth was formed in March 2008 to bring financial services to this new market.

—Symform, based in Seattle, has been honing its cloud data-storage product in beta trials (and a pre-launch version) since the spring. We first profiled the company back in February, and in April, Symform announced it had raised a $1.5 million Series A round from OVP Venture Partners. Its basic idea is to offer cheap, efficient, and secure data storage and backup services to small and medium-sized businesses.

—Enroute, based in Bellevue, WA, is giving a sneak preview of its product—a unified system to help businesses find the most efficient way of shipping packages from A to B. Enroute is one of the finalists from the Zino Society investment forum, which took place last Thursday in Seattle. It is in the running for a $50,000 Zino investment prize, to be announced within the next few weeks.

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San Diego-based ID Analytics is launching a free online test that measures the vulnerability of individual consumers to identity theft.  The test, called My ID Score, makes use of the same huge database and analytical software technology that ID Analytics uses to rank the probability that credit card purchases and other transactions are authentic.

The free online service, which the company is announcing today, enables a consumer to quickly get a ranking of just how exposed he or she may be to identity theft. “You can immediately assess the risk of someone else posing as you,” says ID Analytics Chief Marketing Officer Larry McIntosh. My ID Score is the first public test to use the company’s state-of-the-art technology created to prevent a fraudster from usurping someone else’s personal information and credit to make fraudulent purchases.

My ID Score is a three-digit number, a statistical score, between 1 and 999. The higher the number you get, the bigger the risk of becoming a victim of identity theft. Behind the calculation is the company’s network of billions of identity elements. Only approximately two percent of Americans belong to the moderate risk group, but ID theft is nevertheless a great concern. According to a recent survey, the thought of someone stealing their Social Security Number (SSN) concerns people more than getting their laptop or wallet stolen.

Anyone with SSN and credit history can get a My ID Score from the web page. It’s like an online credit application where you need to insert your name, addresses, date of birth and SSN. The network knows if a fraudulent credit card application or consumer transaction is linked to your personal information. My ID Score recognizes you after few additional questions and gives you a score. Since I’m a citizen of Finland without a U.S. credit history, I used my Xconomy colleague Bruce Bigelow as a guinea pig. He scored 52, which means low-risk.

For someone who receives a high-risk score, the website may recommend contacting the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance to victims of identity theft. The center can help consumers take such steps as freezing their credit cards.

ID Analytics’ McIntosh says the test is not intended to replace other necessary security measures that consumers should be doing, such as monitoring their bank accounts and regularly reviewing their credit reports. Still, he expects the site will reveal many identity thefts. “We want to help consumers help themselves. The victims of identity theft will benefit, and it will benefit our client organizations, too,” he says.

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Americans are more concerned about someone stealing their Social Security Number (SSN) than their wallet, laptop, or purse, according to a survey released today by Ipsos and San Diego-based ID Analytics. Three in five Americans identified their SSN as the personal item they are most concerned about if someone breaks into their home. Almost 60 percent of American adults said they would rather reduce their identity theft by 20 percent than lose 20 pounds. The telephone survey, which was conducted in April, represents an adroit bit of indirect marketing by ID Analytics, which fights identity theft by using advanced pattern-recognition technology to spot fraudulent consumer transactions.

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Steven Gal, who founded San Diego-based ProQuo to help consumers control their personal information and reduce their junk mail, bid a fond farewell in an e-mail blast this afternoon.

“I can’t say I saw this economic nuclear winter coming last year when I decided to take a sabbatical from tech startups and return to teaching after 13 years away,” Gal wrote. “It has been a roller coaster transition, but I am pleased that ProQuo’s new leader, Bob Nascenzi (former COO of TargusInfo) is now well on board. Today is my last day as CEO of ProQuo, and I will be remaining on the Board of Directors.”

Gal says he’ll be teaching entrepreneurship at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management in Ithaca, NY. But he plans to return to San Diego in a year.

Before he started ProQuo in 2007, Gal was a co-founder of San Diego’s ID Analytics, which analyzes consumer transactions for telltale signs of fraud. He worked there in various executive capacities.

ProQuo’s free online service enables consumers to review various mass-market mailing lists (for coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.) and decide with a click of the mouse what junk mail they really want to receive. In effect, it gives consumers a way to selectively customize their mailing list so they only get the catalogs they want, which also happens to make each list a more targeted—and valuable—marketing tool. ProQuo, which makes money by selling the customized lists, says consumers can reduce their unwanted junk mail by 50 to 90 percent within a few months. The startup has received a total of $15 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson of Menlo Park, CA, San Diego’s Mission Ventures, and Western Technology Investment, a venture lender in San Jose, CA.

Gal says he’s excited about the change of scenery, and so is his family.

“My family and I are excited about our upcoming adventure,” Gal writes. “It is a privilege on so many levels—to return to my undergrad alma mater to teach, to get the opportunity to think, work and study with students and faculty again during the very interesting times in which we live—and to introduce my kids who don’t own long pants to a real winter.”

What he doesn’t say is whether he’s told his shorts-only kids that snowfall in Ithaca averages 120 inches a year.

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Bellevue, WA-based Intelius, a company that provides background checks and identity theft protection, has acquired Redwood City, CA-based people search engine Spock, as reported by VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and others. Terms were not disclosed. Intelius was founded in 2003 and is led by CEO Naveen Jain, the founder of InfoSpace.

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Think about a database of 360 billion human identity attributes—names, addresses, dates of birth, credit behavior. That is what San Diego-based ID Analytics‘ has created with its enormous new ID Network. It’s a sophisticated computer technology built to analyze payments and applications for loans, cell phones, and credit cards; it looks for fabricated names and addresses or anything that smells wrong.

Of course, scoring customers for credit-worthiness is something companies and merchants have been doing for thousands of years. Nowadays it’s just done more efficiently.

ID Network is a real-time, cross-industry compilation of identity information. It includes records of two million frauds and eight million suspected frauds. In addition, ID Analytics maintains a “personal topology” in its database, holding information about an individual’s characteristics and his or her connections to others. “It’s unique technology that tells how people behave,” says ID Analytics co-founder and chief product officer Mike Cook. “Fraud will never go away completely, but using the best methods it can be fought.”

Cook and CEO Bruce Hansen founded ID Analytics in March 2002 to help fight identity theft. The company pioneered identity scoring technology where a broad set of consumer data can be used to gauge an individual’s legitimacy. “We knew there can’t be one single technology to prevent fraud. But we thought that if we could immediately see a person’s address that has been involved in fraud, it would be a step forward,” says Cook.

ID Network helps retailers, companies, and organizations quickly answer some burning questions about their customer: Are you who you say you are? Should we do business with you? How should we manage our relationship with you? ID Network knows, for example, how many times a certain name and its date of birth have been associated with a fraud incident. The company has also joined an academic study of techniques for tracking sex offenders, who often use phony addresses or identities.

“We protect the consumers. We have prevented millions of frauds. We do not have many competitors because we don’t sell our data. And we take extremely good care of it,” says Cook.

ID Analytics has approximately 100 employees, and is profitable, according to Cook. “We are even hiring, in this economy. That’s why we are in San Diego, this is a great place to find good people.” Cook now hints that the company is expanding into serving the healthcare sector.

Investors love the anti-fraud professionals, too. In June 2002, ID Analytics raised $10 million in a Series A funding led by Canaan Partners and Trinity Ventures; A-1 and A-2 rounds in 2003 and 2004 brought in another $9.5 million. That was followed by a Series B round in February 2006 that brought in $5.2 million from Mission Ventures, Canaan, and Trinity. And in May 2007, the company raised $20 million in a Series C round led by Investor Growth Capital, and including existing investors Mission, Canaan, and Trinity.

Surprisingly, your identity is more likely to be stolen by someone who knows you than by a stranger. So what do ID security professionals think about social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, where the user is asked to reveal himself or herself to the world? ID Analytics’ Cook says they are “great” and he uses them too. “But consumers have to be diligent. Everything you put online is visible to others. The more information you have open to public, the more you are open to risk.”

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