Corporate Identity Theft on the Rise

prostoalex writes "As millions of Americans lose their identities to online and offline thieves, a new kind of crime has been cooked up by the criminals who are not bothering with doing pesky credit card charges. They steal entire companies, opening up merchant accounts for existing businesses and running up charges from aforementioned stolen credit card numbers. What's worse, is that the hole the criminals exploit seems to be built into the system. According to Bob Sullivan from MSNBC, "Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential.""

Comments

well documented type of theft , just not reported

[Anonymous Chemist]

check out the link http://www.iwks.com/features/default.asp?pagetypei d=2&articleid=31496&subsectionid=655 this type of theft is well known; just not as reported as personal id theft. From other stories is seems the average is 30,000 or more per theft. Seems that perhaps the victum in this story came out lucky. However since you have to provide ID and would get captured on camera setting up a checking account, keeping your real ID does seem to be a challenge.

mostly insider theft

[presmike]

Identity theft was covered at this years blackhat in vegas and it was stated the the vast majority of indentity theft is corporate insiders stealing the info and selling it on the web. Hackers/crackers only account for a small about of the current identity theft.

Re:Note: IRS has a new address

[TykeClone]

That's why you should make out your checks to the "United States Treasury" instead of the "IRS".

This has actually been done before, and anyone can open an account for, as an example, "IsoRectal Spectroscopy" dba "IRS" and cash stolen tax checks.

Re:Damn right the problem is built-in to the syste

[qbzzt]

If the *credit card companies* were the ones who had to suffer the costs of fraud, rather than shifting it to the companies or to the taxpayer, then they would be a HELL of a lot more motivated to add stronger authentication to the system.

Except they are the ones who pay for it. They get to deduct a business loss from their taxes, because those losses reduce their earnings.