Identity Theft Is Usually an Unsophisticated Crime 86
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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.'"
Sample error? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a self selected sample of people who were stupid enough to get caught. The sophisticated ones generally don't get caught, or at least not so quickly.
Checkbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
Retailers are finally getting serious about it (Score:5, Interesting)
i have a store credit card that my wife uses once every few months to buy something. usually baby clothes. a lot of times the card is in the drawer and she would just go the store and tell them my name and they would find the card in the system and ring up the sale. now she says they want to know identifying information like driver's license expiration date, SSN, birthday, etc. she asked about this and they said that they were losing too much money to ID theft.
back in 2006 and 2007 no one cared since business was good. when a recession hits you start to look at every penny you can save
Distortion of the truth (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No, but that's like saying theft is a mundane crime that requires few technical skills. You'd be right -- the majority of those caught are unsophisticated and generally of low intelligence. The only other common traits is that they're generally desperate and were presented with an opportunity. But if they are organized and sophisticated, like say the mafia, or botnet authors -- those very few people who have refined their skills and moved beyond immediate opportunity and are refining their methodology are capable of far, far, more. And the police are ill-equipped to deal with this sophistication because most people who reach that level of competency have researched police investigation methods -- by trolling the same public records this report did and figured out what the common pitfalls are.
Professional criminals may make up a minority per capita, but their "take" is orders of magnitude higher, and risk exposure orders of magnitude lower.
Regarding dumpster diving (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this is probably something most people have looked down upon, but my friends and I used to dumpster dive at hardware distributors in my area just about every weekend. I got things like tower cases, empty raid chassis, piles of working hard drives, decent office supplies, etc. If not ordained, you'd be amazed at how 'clean' most computer company's dumpsters are. No food waste, diapers, or other grizzly things. Just cardboard boxes, all the anti-static bags you could ever want and the occasional soda can.
We all grew older, made more money and cut out the practice, but I was wondering if any of you currently do this? We would often run into police officers since they are curious about people in a business complex at 12am, but were often friendly and left us to our task. Is this still how it goes? I'd imagine with identity theft, coppers may be a little more agressive with people digging through the garbage.
Re:These are just the ones being caught (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a gated community.
The staff are ready to listen 24/7/365.
You can lift weights on the beach.
You have baseball games and television.
There are no loud radios or drag races nearby.
There are educational opportunities not readily available elsewhere. The Twenty Third Psalm (modified "... I am the meanest bastard in the Valley.") hangs on every wall.
Re:Checkbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Having worked in retail and foodservice industry, I hate checks. I'm flabbergasted that any retail outlets still take them.
The rate of fraudulent checks accepted at retail is astronomical; in foodservice it's even worse. The last check-accepting restaurant I worked at that had nearly a 50% rate of fraud on them; mostly from checks being written against closed accounts. The vast majority of these bad checks we never saw a cent from.
The corporate office required that we accept checks as a form of payment; they were located in some rural ghost town, where debit card use still hasn't caught on, and set national policy based on that. In a modern urban area, Visa/MC logo'd debit cards have all but replaced paper checks, and the only people who still use them are the fraudsters.
Checks are terrible, for both those using them and those accepting them.
Re:Capable...? (Score:3, Interesting)
After kicking the guy out, he then called in my information over the phone, to get the sale approved. He verbally repeated all the information over the phone, while several other customers were still in the store. I could have heard those answers from anywhere in the store, even at my age. So after purchasing my first handgun, I felt less secure about crime, due my concern about the possibility of my identity having been stolen. I have been checking my credit reports regularly since then, but everything seems to be OK.
There should be a password associated with our Social Security account number. In fact, they should really get modern and offer the option of using both a password and also a electronic key on our key chains. If a password were used, I would have changed my password after the above incident.