2-Year ID Theft Investigation Yields 86 Arrests; 25 More Sought 154
angry tapir writes with this bit from TechWorld: "Prosecutors call it the biggest identity theft bust in U.S. history. 111 bank tellers, retail workers, waiters and alleged criminals were charged with running a credit-card-stealing organization that stole more than $US13 million in less than a year-and-a-half. 'This is by far the largest — and certainly among the most sophisticated — identity theft/credit card fraud cases that law enforcement has come across,' the Queens County District Attorney's office said in a statement announcing the arrests."
and they turn away from Synthetic CDOs (Score:4, Interesting)
the subprime RMBS, the Credit Default Swap market.... those were trillions of dollars... a single CDO deal could be worth a billion dollars... and law enforcement some how did not "come across" it.
if you want to know why, three of the best books are Confidence Game by Christine S Richard and The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman and EConned by Yves Smith. Another good resource is the film Inside Job by Charles Ferguson.
white-collar law enforcement is flat out corrupted, with guys who head regulatory agencies going soft on big financial institutions, and then getting hired by those institutions a year or two later.
the Synthetic CDO market has been called the biggest ponzi scheme in history, by Janet Tavakoli (who wrote three textbooks on structured finance). and insiders in the industry, like Gregg Lippman of Deutschebank, called it similar names, as revealed by the Levin Coburn senate committee hearings. You can find books like Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lehman bond trader Lawrence McDonald (and Patrick Robinson) who flat out call CDS "gambling". and then there is Lang Gibson , high up in Merrill Lynch's CDO business, who wrote an entire book called 'Lost Trust' about it. Then there is Tetsua Ishikawa, who wrote a novel called "How I caused the Credit Crunch" - he was an ex-Goldman Sachs guy .
Now lets not even discuss the Commodity Index Funds, or how "someone in Washington" prevented Goodman's article in a trade journal that blamed the GSCIF for manipulating market prices of commodities, or the article in Harpers that said similar things. Also lets not even go into how JP Morgan and other bailed-out banks have bought entire warehouses to hoard metals (Copper being the one JPM was caught doing), or that the head of JP Morgan's commodities business is none other than Blythe Masters - who was on the original JPM team that invented Credit Default Swaps in the 1990s.
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
As Goodman quotes a Trader in her book, about why the cops never go busting the massive cocaine deals going on in places like the New York Mercantile exchange... "[why would they want to get caught up in a shit show like that? Theyd rather be busting Pablo in Harlem]". the same principle applies to other financial crimes, like theft and fraud. Why would a regulator or cop want to get caught up in a shit show like that?
"Fraud" is a better term for it than "theft". (Score:5, Interesting)
And fraud has been with us for a long, long time.
As the practices of the consumers have shifted (writing few checks, using less cash, increased credit/debit card use, on-line banking) the methods of fraud have shifted.
Unfortunately, the banks were able to also shift the "responsibility" for the fraud to the consumers.
If someone uses your identity to commit fraud then YOU are responsible for cleaning up the mess.
Even when YOU do not have any tools to PREVENT the fraud or even to be aware of it before the bank/store files a complaint against you.
Re:Identity "theft" (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you were making a joke, but I feel like pointing this out anyways since you brought it up.
"Identity Theft" is a bit of a misnomer, but it's not because of the 'theft' part. Something is being stolen, it's just not the identity. What's been stolen is the persons credit. The identity is just the tool used to do so.
"Credit Theft" just doesn't have the same punch to it though, so I doubt we'll see the name being changed in the name of pedantry anytime soon.
On a different note: ((13 million / 111) * 2) / 3 = $78,078.08 per year, if it was distributed evenly among all conspirators. Since some of the comments here quote the article as having some of the perpetrators renting jets, it certainly looks like some of the people involved in this sure got the short end of the stick considering the risk they're facing.
Remember kids, if you're going to steal millions of dollars, you need to incorporate first to avoid liability! ;-)
Re:Identity "theft" (Score:4, Interesting)
If the financial institutions didn't hold the provably innocent party responsible, then identity theft wouldn't be an issue and the losses from it would drop.