Back in my criminal days, I engaged in identity theft of sorts. To be precise, I guess you could say that I engaged in profession theft. Although I never took on the identity of a living person—I never believed in crimes against the individual—I became a generic copilot and a lawyer and a doctor, among my guises. To pull this off took cleverness and perhaps a bit of a diabolical mind. You needed to be able to turn on the sweet grease and charm. I had to learn about airplanes and pilot lingo. I had to learn the law. I had to learn a suitable amount of medicine. I had to create believable IDs and acquire uniforms. I had to be able to stay cool under pressure.
Today, the identity thief can do what I did, and so much more, hiding behind numbers. No one tests his knowledge.
Identity theft is so new that it wasn’t even formally recognized as a specific federal offense until 1998, when, prompted by growing evidence of the crime, Congress passed a law, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. And though I speak of it as the crime of the future, because of its potential, it already is an enormous problem. I’ve heard estimates that half a million Americans a year are victims.
Identity theft is a chilling crime because the perpetrator is innocent until proven guilty, while the victim is guilty until he proves himself innocent. Until you’ve been caught up in this crime, you can’t imagine how hard it is to prove that innocence. It can be a nightmare of unimaginable proportions to get your credit and your identity back, if you ever fully do.
A HORSE OF MANY COLORS
The approaches taken by identity thieves vary a great deal. Most often, the thief is a total stranger, someone you’ve never seen and who has never seen you. But not always. A woman living alone in her own house took on a roommate for some added income and companionship. The roommate lived with her for nine months. She was amiable enough, and always paid her rent on time. One day she told the woman she had gotten a job offer out West, and so she would be moving. The woman was happy for her, and thought nothing of it.
A few weeks after the roommate left, the woman got a call from a bank officer. The officer said the bank had received her most recent mortgage payment, the same as always, but it hadn’t received the payment for her second mortgage. “Second mortgage?” the woman said. “What second mortgage?” It seems that the roommate, by rummaging through the woman’s utility bills and other mail, had acquired enough information to pose as her and take out a second mortgage, the money that got her out West.
One identity thief managed to accumulate more than one hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt, take out a federal home loan, buy several homes, motorcycles, and handguns, all in the victim’s name. But that still wasn’t enough for him. He would also call the victim and hector him, taunting him that he could buy all he wanted for as long as he wanted, and he would never be caught. Finally, the thief filed for bankruptcy—naturally in the victim’s name. At the time, identity theft wasn’t a federal crime, so when he was finally caught the criminal served a brief sentence for making a false statement to purchase a gun. There were no other repercussions. He made no restitution to the victim. Meanwhile, it took the victim and his wife four years and fifteen thousand dollars to restore their credit and reputation.
A Milwaukee man used a stolen Social Security number to obtain additional identity documents and set up an array of fraudulent accounts. Under his new identity, he got a job at the Wisconsin Supreme Court then stole eighty thousand dollars of computer equipment from the court. While he worked there, he also collected Social Security benefits because he claimed he was disabled and unemployed.
Con artists will steal the identities of the prominent as well as the unknown. The FBI came across two Memphis thieves that said they stole the identities of six leading executives, including the chief executive officers of Lehman Brothers, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Hilton Hotels. Two of the impersonated executives had recently died.
Before they were caught, the hucksters managed to order $730,000 worth of diamonds and Rolex watches over the Internet. They did this by having the credit card companies and banks change the billing addresses of the executives to hotels in the Memphis area, then ordering the merchandise to be shipped to the hotels. The attraction of using the names of wealthy executives was their credit was so good. When the jewelers that sold the goods contacted American Express about putting purchases of $40,000 on cards purportedly belonging to the executives, there was no hesitation. They got immediate approval.
IT’S AS EASY AS . . .
How does someone steal your identity? With the sharp erosion of privacy, the variants are endless. A thief doesn’t have to break into your home or hold you up. It all gets done on the sly.
One straightforward method is “shoulder surfing,” which I told you about earlier with ATM fraud. A thief watches you as you punch in your credit card or calling card number at a pay phone. Or he eavesdrops on your conversation as you give your number to a hotel or merchant. From that one number, he gathers other information about you and is on his way.
Another popular approach is “Dumpster diving.” Crooks root through your garbage cans, trash bins outside stores, or on street corners, or communal Dumpsters. They toss away the chicken bones and old newspapers, and collect credit card statements, bank statements, phone bills, copies of checks, or anything that shows your name and address. These records are gold to an identity thief.
How many times have you gotten a stack of “preapproved” credit cards in the mail and, already being flush with cards, simply tossed the envelopes in the garbage without ripping them up? The identity thief thanks you very much. He goes ahead and attempts to activate the cards, often with success. Some credit card companies require that you activate a new card only from your home phone number, but this precaution hasn’t been universally adopted. A few years ago, federal authorities broke up the Trash Ring, a group that stole more than $10 million in dozens of states, largely by recovering cards and account information from Dumpsters and trash cans.
If you’ve been divorced, the transcript of your case, bulging with financial and credit information that you had to reveal, as well as your Social Security number, is public record. A thief need only stop in at the courthouse and scribble down what he needs.
One recently-arrested identity thief, a low-level employee at a drug company, happened to come across a box of personnel records for three dozen former employees. The box was lying in a storage closet of the company. When you’ve got a criminal mind, a box like that is a bonanza. The thief, along with several accomplices, used the records to get credit cards, buy more than one hundred thousand dollars of goods, and rent three apartments in other people’s names. For a time, they lived a joyous life that was way beyond their own means.
Employees at a New Jersey car dealer used the company access to the three leading credit bureaus—Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian—to find strangers with good credit histories, some of them living as far away as Alaska, and then opened up credit card accounts in their names.
A group of Nigerians established themselves in the industrial cleaning business. They had trucks. They had uniforms. They had cleaning supplies. In due course, they had customers. They would come into the company offices at night and clean the place. And they did a beautiful job. But they cleaned the offices of more than grime. They knew how to get at personnel records and would copy Social Security numbers and whatever other useful information they found and steal identities.
And there are endless come-ons that thieves use to sucker people into unwittingly divulging personal information. Not long ago, some fairly provocative flyers suddenly popped up in scores of black communities throughout the South and Midwest. They were stacked on tables in churches, stuck in windshield wipers of parked cars, and tacked to the bulletin boards of senior citizen centers and nursing homes. The headline on them read: “Apply for Newly Approved Slave Reparations! Claim $5,000 in Social Security Reimbursements!” The body of the flyers said that blacks born before 1928 could be eligible for
slave reparations under the “Slave Reparation Act.” Those born between 1917 and 1926 could apply for Social Security disbursements because of a “fix” made in the Social Security system.
Obviously, a burst of good fortune like this was something that would pique a person’s interest, and it seemed plausible. There had been a lot of talk and press about proposed legislation that would pay reparations to black people. But the whole thing was nothing more than a trap set by a ring of identity thieves.
In the Atlanta metropolitan area, a man posing as a jury administrator from the local court system would call people, mostly the wealthy and business owners, and say, “You’ve forgotten to respond to a summons for jury duty and face a penalty. I can straighten it out right now for you, if you just give me some basic information.” Assuming they had overlooked the summons, or it had gotten lost in the mail, the victims would unquestioningly provide their birth dates, mother’s maiden name, and Social Security numbers.
Thieves are not at all squeamish about stealing the identity of someone that recently died and resurrecting him for the purpose of spending money. This works because credit bureaus usually don’t learn about someone’s death for six to twelve months. A common place to locate the personal information necessary here is an obituary. People fail to realize the abundance of material contained in an obituary, particularly that all-important mother’s maiden name so universally used for identification means.
One pair of identity thieves stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from some two-dozen victims in seven states. Most of them were selected out of “Who’s Who in America,” which in its biographies of prominent Americans gives birth date, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and home address, sufficient information for them to request birth certificates and establish credit.
Recently, there was a run of identity thefts involving admirals of the U.S. Navy. One admiral complained that he had been a victim, then another admiral and another—ultimately seven in all. It happens that the thieves were digging out personal information on them from the Congressional Record. It routinely lists all the data a criminal needs to become a military officer.
One woman had her identity stolen by her boss. She was hired by the owner of a magazine publisher, and, in filling out her employment application, divulged the usual supply of personal information. Little did she know that her employer had ruined her own credit in the past and couldn’t even get a credit card. Within months of the woman being hired, her boss took out a card in her name and began using it. Who would suspect their boss? But literally anyone can be after your identity.
Years ago, I predicted that once there was a shake-out among all the dot-com startups, criminals would step in and offer to buy up the assets of failed e-commerce companies. Why would they? To get their databases, rich with personal information on customers, including credit card numbers. I bet it’s already happened. When it was functioning, the retailer Toysmart.com assured its customers that their personal information would never be shared with anyone. When it went bankrupt in May 2000, that promise went out the window. It took out ads offering to sell its database. Fortunately, a subsidiary of Walt Disney agreed to pay it fifty-thousand dollars to destroy the information before it got into the wrong hands.
NUMBERS FOR SALE
The Internet has become the equivalent of an electronic shopping mall for identity thieves. Endless websites have sprung up that sell personal information. One site, docusearch.com, will retrieve a person’s Social Security number for a mere forty-nine dollars. How long will it take? One day.
It’s all perfectly legal. They buy this information from the nineteen states that use the Social Security number for the driver’s license number. They’ll go to a driver’s license bureau and ask, how many Social Security numbers do you have? They’re told, 1.3 million. Okay, can we buy them for $8 a number? They’ll approach one of the major health insurers, with millions of numbers, and again buy them for $8 apiece. They buy numbers from collection agencies and credit bureaus, and they resell the information for $49 a number. The only thing you have to type in is the person’s name and the last-known state you believe he or she lived in, and within seconds, up comes the Social Security number. I’ve gone online a number of times to test it out and they’ve never not had the number. Try it yourself.
Another website, netdetective2000, brags that it will find out “everything you ever wanted to know about your friends, family, neighbors, employees, and even your boss!” All you do is take your mouse and click on the information you want. It’s a complete dossier: the person’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, bank, bank account number, what stocks he owns, who his stock broker is, where he works, what he does at his job, what he makes, if he has children, his children’s names, their ages, and their Social Security numbers.
If you’re wondering who’s telling them all this information, you are. When you bought a camera, there was a warranty card, and attached to that warranty card was a consumer questionnaire. Are you married, divorced, single, separated? Are you a doctor, a lawyer, a professional, a technician, or other? Do you earn between $20,000 and $50,000, $50,000 and $100,000? Do you bank at a bank, credit union, savings bank, or mutual fund house? You went right down the list answering all their questions and all of that information went into a data base. Then they turned around and sold it, and the next thing you know, it was being used against you.
There’s another website that advertises on TV called 1-800–SEARCH. They say they can find out if someone has a criminal record. Then, in a lower tone of voice, they say, “or fifty other things.” And the fifty other things are just about anything you would want to know about someone. It’s unbelievable what they know about people—practically everything down to their favorite doughnut and how they did in third-grade social studies—and I’m talking about ordinary people who think they live a private life.
Everything is for sale. A Social Security number is $49. A birth certificate is $79. A driver’s license is $90. Or if you want an entire package of documents just for the purpose of assuming someone’s identity, it goes for $2,000.
I went to the doctor the other day. It wasn’t my regular doctor, but an oral surgeon I hadn’t seen before. The receptionist had me fill out a new patient questionnaire, then she needed my Blue Cross card, which contains my Social Security number, and my driver’s license. She made copies of both, and all this was deposited in the doctor’s file. That receptionist, or the next receptionist, could easily sell that information.
In a number of instances, low-paid hospital orderlies have stolen and sold patient information. Medical records are especially attractive to identity thieves, as they contain your Social Security number, date of birth, and even a physical description. Some criminals, to help their fraud, have actually undergone plastic surgery to look more like their victim. Imagine that—someone who not only says he’s you but looks like your twin!
A twenty-three-year-old New Jersey man was surfing the Internet at the public library one day, when he happened across the site of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). There, he discovered a database of disclosure forms that public companies must file with the regulatory body. These forms contained the names of company officials and their Social Security numbers. Using the name of an official of a company who was thirty-four years older than he, he managed to gain approval for a $44,000 car loan from a major bank. He got a quote for car insurance from an online broker, then used a fraudulent MasterCard to pay for the policy. To actually buy the car, he needed proof he was the executive, so he picked up a fake birth certificate and W-2 form from a website that sold fake credentials. Then he went and bought a new Prelude. Because the executive had such excellent credit, the thief actually negotiated better financing from the car dealer than he had from the bank.
SHADOW OF YOURSELF
Once your identity has been stolen, everything doesn’t just return to normal. You’ll find yourself inconvenienced long after the culprit
is caught. After she had been victimized, one woman put an alert with the credit agencies that if anyone applied for credit in her name, she had to be called and told about it. Months afterward, she was shopping for Christmas gifts and decided to buy her son a TV at an electronics store. Since you got a discount if you opened a credit account with the store, she tried to do so. The salesperson went to process it, only to come back and tell her, he was sorry, he couldn’t extend her credit because there was nobody at her home when he called. Of course not, she said, I’m here talking to you. Well, he said, your credit bureau says I have to speak to you at your home before I can issue credit. So she had to drive home, take his call, then drive back.
A highly placed corporate executive had his identity stolen by a major drug dealer. These days, when the executive travels overseas, he has to carry an official letter with him that states that he is not the drug dealer. He’ll always have to carry that letter with him. His life has been irrevocably changed.
I read about a woman writer who had her Social Security number stolen while she was living overseas. Using her name and number, the thief ordered telephone service in California, ran up thousands of dollars in bills, and then vanished without paying them. When the writer returned to the United States and applied to rent an apartment in New York, the landlord found she had a negative credit rating and wouldn’t rent her the apartment. She had to take a sublet while she tried to get to the bottom of things.