Glut In Stolen Identities Forces Price Cut

CowboyRobot writes "The price of a stolen identity has dropped as much as 37 percent in the cybercrime underground: to $25 for a U.S. identity, and $40 for an overseas identity. For $300 or less, you can acquire credentials for a bank account with a balance of $70,000 to $150,000, and $400 is all it takes to get a rival or targeted business knocked offline with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire attack. Meanwhile, ID theft and bank account credentials are getting cheaper because there is just so much inventory (a.k.a. stolen personal information) out there. Bots are cheap, too: 1,000 bots go for $20, and 15,000, for $250."

Re:those numbers seem unsustainable

[ATMAvatar]

Exactly. You aren't going to successfully withdraw all $150k in one go. Withdraw $100 once or twice a week, and there's a decent chance the owner may not notice for some time.

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Need To Flood Market With Fake Identities

[retroworks]

It should be easy enough for someone here to harvest phonebook or other records from 70 years ago, refresh and randomize birth dates, and begin to flood the identity theft market with fake personalities and random government identity records. That would greatly increase the amount of work for identity thieves, who actually benefit from passwords (which provide evidence it's bonafide identity they are stealing). For years I've promoted "camouflage" rather than invisibility. I now think the reason it has not taken off (disappearance of AntiPhorm?) is that it's equally a threat to Google, Bing, and advertising-based search engines. We can be less careful of our "identity needles" if we construct bigger "digital haystacks".

See article on digital haystacks and cookie camouflage http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/09/simpler-ideas-cookie-camouflage-digital.html [blogspot.com]

Oh, by the way, I'm not really Retroworks. I find I get higher mods if I steal a /. identity rather than to submit AC

Re:Take Mine For Free

[Jason Levine]

Clean arrest record and a good tech education, though

Sadly, there's more than just financial identity theft. There's criminal identity theft also. Here's how it works:

1) Criminal arrested for some crime.
2) Criminal gives your name/SSN/DOB/etc to the police.
3) Arrest goes onto your criminal record and not the real criminal's record.

Now you go for a job interview and your potential employer runs a background check. Suddenly, they find out that you've committed felonies across three states and were arrested nine times. You don't get that job offer - or any other one. Plus, if the local police stop you for any reason, they'll find out you're a "felon" and will treat you as such. No matter how many times you try to clear this up, if even one database still links you to the crimes, it will flow back over and start again.

At one point, I was following the blog of someone who had this happen to him. He couldn't find a job, was being harassed by police, and nobody would help him. All this.despite the fact that the photo of "him" at the arrest was clearly not really him. People just trusted what was "in the system" even if the system seemed wrong. Last I heard, after years of struggling, he had finally gotten some people to listen and begin the process of clearing his record.

It's insane that one criminal with a stolen identity could ruin someone's life like this but it does happen.