Identity Theft Is Usually an Unsophisticated Crime 86
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by
Soulskill
from the skilled-in-refuse-investigation dept.
from the skilled-in-refuse-investigation dept.
apatrick writes "A recent research report by Heith Copes (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Lynne Vieraitis (University of Texas at Austin) has examined identity thieves and their methods. Copes and Vieraitis searched federal court records in the US for people convicted of identity theft and then tried to find out where they were serving their sentences. They were able to find 297 inmates, from which they sampled 59 inmates in 14 prisons across the country. The convicts agreed to do detailed interviews, in private, to talk about themselves and their crimes, and the results are reported in a recent issue of Criminal Justice Review. According to Copes and Vieraitis, 'it is best categorized as an economic crime committed by a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds through a variety of legitimate (e.g., mortgage broker) and illegitimate (e.g., burglar) occupations.' As to the issue of whether these are white-collar criminals, the authors say: 'Despite public perceptions of identity theft being a high-tech, computer driven crime, it is rather mundane and requires few technical skills. Identity thieves do not need to know how to hack into large, secure databases. They can simply dig through garbage or pay insiders for information. No particular group has a monopoly on the skills needed to be a capable identity thief.'"
Capable...? (Score:5, Informative)
Being a successful identity thief, however, is a different story, I believe. Measuring that success by remaining uncaught. It's ridiculous how much of the information necessary to "steal" someone's identity is easily available, without needing to dig very deep. The hardest part would be SS#, but even then it's not that hard to get, considering how often someone asks for mine, and refuses to take anything else.Having lost my entire wallet once, I called the 3 credit monitoring groups and put a fraud watch on it, or whatever it is they called it, and I really think it should be standard. It requires that they contact you personally to verify any new openings of credit cards.
I was a victim (Score:1, Informative)
The first thing that happened is that the thief simply wrote over the name and dollar amounts on the check with a red felt tip pen, walked INTO a bank and turned it into cash. Apparently at not point did this set off any flags with the teller. That was pretty easy to get straightened out because it was so obvious what had happened.
However, a few days after that the thief opened a few lines of credit and made some large purchases, including a furniture set that was delivered to a vacant house. I only found out about these a few months later when some credit collection agencies started coming after me. That was a bit more difficult to clear up. It involved numerous visits to offices of the various lending institutions that backed the lines of credit that were opened and a bunch of sworn affidavits, fingerprints, etc.
Point being, all this was done because someone swiped something from my mailbox. Nothing high-tech involved. I trust online banking and money transfers far more than I trust a little box out in front of my house.
Re:Capable...? (Score:2, Informative)
The hardest part would be SS#
Actually, SSNs are assigned sequentially. If you have enough of them (even 10% of the dataset would be enormously useful) and a DOB, you can get pretty close. Plus you can eliminate certain combinations: any field with all zeros, for example, is not used. A useful thing to know if you need to give your SSN out to someone other than an employer, bank, or the IRS -- most systems accept the input (no sanity checks, oops), and you can be sure you're not interfering with somebody else's credit doing so.
Re:These are just the ones being caught (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think that the Federal Correctional Institution near Littleton, Colorado has a beach (hint: he is in prison, as is Fastow).
If you're in jail, you're unsophisticated (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who thinks ID theft and the mechanisms used to achieve it are unsophisticated, badly needs to read this [webtorque.org] (700K PDF). Badly.
Re:The *real* flaw in the system is exposed (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/03/ruling-rattles-mortgage-industry/ [lasvegassun.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/27gret.html [nytimes.com]