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Safeway Club Card Leads to Bogus Arson Arrest
Richard M. Smith writes "Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way
that supermarket loyalty cards come with a huge price. Lyons was arrested
last August and charged with attempted arson. Police alleged at the time
that Lyons tried to set fire to his own house while his wife and children
were inside. According to KOMO-TV and the Seattle Times, a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in January 2005 because another person stepped forward saying he or she
set the fire and not Lyons."
I'm thinking it was the wife who came forward and took responsibility for this crime. She probably had access to the Safeway Club Card, and most likely would not want to see her husband wrongfully convicted. I find it kind of sketchy that the prosecutor would not say who it is!
No decision has been made whether that person will be charged
Are you kidding me? The wrongfully-accused was charged almost immediately, and now this guy fronted up and they're thinking about it?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How did police get the record of his Safeway purchases??? Can I go to my local safeway and see my personal record of purchases? What is Safeways Privacy policy... OH NEVERMIND... forgot we live in post 9/11 america.
Your Rights Online... The big thing here is a Supermarket loyalty card was used against the customer.
His house was set on fire.
He was charged with and arrested for arson.
What part of this story is "happy"?
The only thing that stood between him and serious prison time (not to mention probably losing all of his friends, family and destroying his career and reputation) was that the criminal who was responsible came forward. Do you know how rare that is? His "fortune" here was like falling off a 110 story building and having a huge gust of wind on a still day scoop you to safety at the very last second.
Let's not even entertain the possibility that someone could have died in the fire. If that were the case, I bet nobody would have stepped forward and this guy would have taken the fall - all so Safeway could target their demographics better. More, he probably would have been sentenced to life in prison at the least and everyone would be cheering for his execution. Because, of course, he's guilty if he has been convited, so he should fry!
This was a stomach-churning close-call.
I can't help thinking Michael posted this so that we could get up in arms, but that's how the system (and life in general) works. It's not always flawless and perfect, and legal investigations can sometimes lead to other areas that turn out to be incorrect. It's likely the authorities would have figured it out eventually. Not that I don't feel for the guy, getting wrongly arrested. But if it happened to me, and it was because of the kind of "evidence" described here, I wouldn't feel wronged in any way. I would understand that it was a valid mistake.
Which explain why there was at yet no charge retained against the new suspect. Nevertheless to those usually saying "if you have nothing to hide you do not need privacy" well this is one example of WHY we want privacy. Instead of searching for hard proof, the police seems to have only concentrated on circumstancial evidence (supermarket sale, and dog go right to the door).
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A card used to rack up shopping points was used against the owner of the card.
you get some measly shopping vouchers or gifts not worth their value
and the shop gets to target its market better
while they log exactly what you buy
which leads to this guy in this case, being screwed by this opt-in gathered infomation.
Makes pulling out those loyalty cards out of your wallet so encouraging huh?
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Depending on the circumstances the prosecutor might be loath to prosecute the child.
His kid would have access to his Safeway card. (Another kid might have access to his phone number, which will work just as well.)
The confessor is not being identified. (Also suggesting a child.)
A magistrate who found a £3,250 Rolex watch in a supermarket and gave it to his wife as a 60th birthday present was fined £600 after being found guilty of theft.
Rowlett, a building surveyor, was caught almost two years later after taking the watch for repair at a jewellers near his home in Poole.
It was identified from its serial number as having been lost or stolen.
Inquiries with Tesco, through its Club Card loyalty scheme records, and receipts of purchases showed Rowlett had been in the shop within two hours of Mrs ScottI agree, there's not much happy about it.
This was a stomach-churning close-call.
I guess I have more faith in the system.
They'd have to convince a jury that this "noble, hard working volunteer firefighter who loves his adoring family very much and just, out of the kindness of his own heart, adopted a child into his home and family", started a fire to kill them all.
And apparently they planned on doing it with nothing but circumstantial evidence which would vanish once a trial started. Any defense lawyer worth a damn is going to have a Safeway employee on the stand explaining several different ways someone could use his Safeway Club Card #.
You can just give them a phone number to get the discount, so use your friends/bosses/relatives. (At least here, in N.Cali, you can. I do it all the time.) For extra fun, use your bosses number while buying fifty bucks worth of saran wrap and baby oil at three in the morning. I know there was a guy who had a project going to get a bunch of people to use his card. I believe it was linked on /., actually.
Given that you can do all of the above (without whoever owns the card knowing about it), whoever was involved in the investigation ought to get a swift kick in the ass and a lifetime ban from any position of authority.
The emphasis is mine.
Fly-buys is a large loyalty scheme in Australia. AUSTRAC are the spooks responsible for tracing money as it flows through the economy.
Basically, the government is well aware of the abilty of loyalty schemes to trace otherwise untraceable cash transactions, and they would rather the public didn't know about it (as proven by the bungled attempt at censorship).
Which is why I used a fake name and address when I signed up for my loyalty cards.
I've never seen any supermarket employee ask for ID when you fill out a loyalty card application. If anything, the employees are completely indifferent about letting customers borrow each others' cards, and will even provide spare cards of their own for customer who forget theirs.
Just use a fake name and address that are not obviously bogus, get the price discount, and stop worrying.
I pay for everything with my VISA, i'm sure they would be able to take the ID number from the loyalty card and match it with my credit card. (All my loyalty cards have a unique ID and are scanned in at the time of the purchase).
A couple of months ago i visited the US for a few weeks. At a Safeway store i asked for a club card and got one without filling in any form. She didn't even ask, perhaps because she knew i was a foreigner. In my home country all my discount cards are anonymous. I just refuse to give my personal data. Works all the time.
These absolutely conlusive datas, like digital data (used in this case) or genetic data (very similar because it is unique) bear a great danger. Since this data seems to be so unmistakable people think that the hint itself (pointing to a guilty or innocent person) is to be taken for granted too.
I could get a few hairs from someone, murder his wife, spread his hairs all over the place and the police would most probably think it was him (he was in his bed sleeping at home with nobody to witness)
BUT ITS just a CLUE. If i had worn a neoprene suit no genetic data would have dropped by me. The police would think that person is guilty. A good police investigator would know its only a hint and not enough to convict someone. Unfortunately the public is thinking that this data is confirmed.
Spelling errors were made for your amusement only...
Heh, hit the nail on the head with that one ;) It seems a lot of people here don't realise this - you only need to charge a credit card against it once and the link is made.
If you should ever find yourself on a jury. Chances are, had this gone to trial, he would've been convicted, and be in jail right now.
All the evidence is circumstantial and really pretty flimsy. The dog circling to the front door? Well of course he's going to detect that the family was in their own yard. While from movies we get these impressions of "superdogs" that do police work, in reality, such dogs are quite prone to make mistakes.
So his club card (not, apparently, his credit card-examine what's NOT said. The credit card would've been far stronger evidence. Had he used that, they would've worried about getting evidence from that and not even been concerned with the club card.) was used to make the purchases. So what? I signed up for my club card with bogus information. Sometimes, I forget the card, and I have no idea what BS phone number I put down, so I use my boss's phone #. He must have one of those cards, it always works. But I've certainly never been asked to verify my identity when doing so.
The real moral of this story-cops and prosecutors are often overzealous. When you are on a jury, do not ask yourself "Does it look like this guy did it?" Ask yourself instead "Has it been proven to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this person did it? Would I stake x years of my life on the fact that this guy did it?" Because you are staking years of someone's life on your decision. If you cannot say "I am sure"-even if you can say "I'm almost sure"-the vote is not guilty. Even if the other 11 say otherwise. Stick it out and hang the jury if you have to, but do NOT condemn a person guilty unless you are ABSOLUTELY sure. People are exonerated every day because some jury thought "probably did it" equated to "for-sure did it."
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The only way to make bogus data work, name address, etc. is to use cash 100% of the time.
The moment you tie a member card to a transaction paid by cheque, debit card or whatever, there is now a link between you and the card. From that moment on, that card, bogus data or not, will be linked to you.
That's why many stores don't care if you fill out the application using the name Micky Mouse then you turn around and pay by debit card or cheque. Or a store manager upon asking will give you a card without filling out an application and then you turn around and pay by cheque. The minute the transaction is processed, your profile, the cards data, is updated with the new information.
There's not just one name linked to a card either. Swap with friends and all that does is link another name to the card. They still have records of this person bought this and this other person bought that.
My local store, if all you tell them is you forgot your card, they say no problem and the cashier scans a store card kept at the register. So what? As long as you pay by anything other than cash, a new transaction is created that can be cross referenced back to you. You don't think for a minute that debit card numbers, bank account numbers etc. are *not* part of the member card transaction record?
Member cards were a solution to group transactions by cross reference. One household may have 6-7 methods of paying. One couple has seperate checking accounts, their own credit/debit cards, that's four methods right there. Add different credit cards and now a household may have 7 ways to pay. Member cards were introduced only to help group these transactions into a larger household picture. Household demographics is what they're after, "household" is the holy grail of demographics.
They lost this household demographic when they started to accepted plastic as payment. Ever notice member cards were not introduced until stores started taking CC/Debit cards for payments? They've been tracking purchases for 30 years. Back then, joint checking accounts were common and paying by cheque was the only method other than cash. Back then household demographics was a simplier excerise. It's worth a few cents off an inflated price to incurage you to help them group these new plastic transactions by household.
So, except that the government has caught on that this can be a wealth of information, this is nothing new. Unless you use cash 100% of the time you're not beating the system the way you think you are by filling out the application with false data.
Scenario:
- you apply for health insurance;
- your insurer looks up your loyalty card records, and says "I see you've been buying fatty foods, pizza, chips, chocolate. "
- same insurer checks your credit card records: "I see no Gym payments here, you don't work out, do you?"
- "At least you don't smoke, then we'd refuse to insure you at all."
- "OK, we can insure you, it will just cost you much more, because of your lifestyle. We will use any excuse to charge you more."
The same goes for life insurance, or car insurance if you are noted buying alcohol.
I know about the UK Data Protection Act and similar EU laws (I'm a Brit living in Ireland) - I've had people tell me not to worry, this can't happen, the law prevents it. Yes, they do - today - but these laws were put in place by politicians, and can be nullified just as easily, if an apparent reason emerges.
Example: in the UK, what if the Health Secretary is told that prioritizing NHS treatment in this way will save £billions? There goes your legal protection. It might not need to go to a Parliament vote, with the powers (s)he already has. Checking your records for apparent negligence on your part is a lot cheaper than putting you through a physical examination, right?
(this is not a
I could use George Washington's card. They don't check those things.
Cases like this just remind us that there's no such thing as anonymity, at least not anymore. Unless you live alone and isolated in a cave somewhere (or a small cabin say, heh), someone, somewhere knows who you are. So how does one deal with this? Fake data? Use cash only? Nah, just act like a celebrity! Do everything as if everyone knows who you are, what you are doing, and who you are doing it with/to. In the age of computers and the internet, we are all stars on stage.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Having run the loyalty card systems for this and a few other large grocery chains in the early 90's, I have seen a ton of horror stories related to the use of the data.
Some examples:
-A large chain of grocery stores that also had pharmacys sold the data about what medications their customers bought to an insurance company. The insurance company ran the medication list against each policy holder's health insurance info and then cancelled people who bought drugs like heart medication without the insurance company being aware of it.
-Another chain had a promotion tied to their loyalty cards that gave customers a turkey for Thanksgiving based on how much they spent and it also gave them more stuff is they bought specific things. When the statement of exactly what was purchased came to the chain's CEO's home, it revealed to his wife that he bought huge amounts of flowers for his mistress and it resulted in his divorce.
-A single mother who had just lost her young son in a car accident bought some baby gifts in a chain grocery store and used her frequent shopper card when she paid in order to get a small discount. The purchases of these items caused her to be flagged as a new mother and be immediately put on a ton of mailing lists relating to "the joy of motherhood", etc. Hardly a pleasant reminder after losing her only child.
I guess that my point in posting this is that the privacy issues with these cards are quite far reaching. They can have real personal impact and their use should be considered VERY CAREFULLY. They can have benefits that one might find valuable, but they can have devistating and totally unforseen consequences.
Caviat Carrier?
That's disgusting!
Now, grape jelly on the other hand...
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
- You could be accused of crime based almost solely on things you bought at the store. The dude put out the fire and called 911. Not exactly a bright arsonist, now is he? I blame the prosecutors as much as the cops. Who looks at a shopping receipt and a tracking dog and thinks they have a case against the person who put the fire out? And the dude was a fire fighter. You'd think someone with intimate knowledge of the business could come up with something that isn't going to leave as much evidence behind.
- Once information about you exists somewhere it can be used for things you might not be able to envision at the time you turned the information over. You bought kerosene for a space heater, fertilzer for your lawn, some batteries and a spare garage door opener because your wife's car is a purse on wheels and she lost it. Then one day Homeland Security is showing up at your door. Unfortunately that's not unreasonably paranoid these days.
Still think you have nothing to hide? What's really pathetic is that people who really know trade craft and are willing to actually do something bad with those materials also know how to make it difficult to track their purchases. If they have an organized network some of those materials may have been purchased months or years previously by middle buyers now long gone who had no idea why they were buying two tons of fertilizer a few bags at a time.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Or someone else who had access to the firestarters. The guy could have denied that he bought them when the cops asked if he had, trying to deny that he had anything to do with it (because he didn't). Lots of people's first instinct is to avoid any appearance of association with a bad act, especially when confronted by police, even if it can make them look more guilty later. In the moment, it's easier to deny, than to get arrested and convince the judge instead of just the cop.
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make install -not war
Shopping for the tools for your next crime? Pay cash, don't buy locally, and FOR GOD SAKE DON'T USE A #$@# SHOPPER'S CLUB CARD!
Trust me, getting caught won't justify the $0.30 savings you got on the matches and lighter fluid.
I don't know who's stupider: An arsonist who actually used a shopper's club card, or the police for assuming the arsonist was so stupid as to use a shopper's club card (and not to frame someone else). You would THINK the latter would be one of the first hypotheses entertained by the police before they go off and charge the guy whose name is attached to the card.
"If they can get all the info they need from your credit card and check then why do they need the member card to idnetify you anyhow?"
Well, for one thing, the member card provides a link between credit card purchases (which have your personal info) and cash purchases (which would normally be anonymous). If you even once use a credit/debit card with your member card all of your previous and future purchases with that member card are then related to your name & address.
"All I can think of is that somehow the act of getting a member card is an authorization for them to collect that information."
Yes, among other things. Not that anybody ever reads these agreements, but it also gives them the right to sell your name and address, usually.
clearly it was Mr Plum in the living room with the grill starter
I guess I have more faith in the system.
I don't.
Here in Illinois, 50% of those on death row were proven by genetic analysis to be innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted.
50%.
One in two people sentenced to death had been wrongly convicted, and were only exonerated pre-mortem because they happen to have enough appeals in place to postpone their executions until a technology came along able to prove they weren't the culprits. These people were in some cases convicted on evidence a hell of a lot more flimsy than a Safeway Club Card purchasing record, and they were sentenced to die.
The numbers were so horrific that our Governor at the time, a Republican who until then had supported the death penalty, placed a moratorium on all further executions in the state, and rightly so.
Of course, this "new" technology, like any other, is falable, and in a case like this one (where everything's gone up in smoke, and where the accused lived there anyway) entirely inapplicable, so lest someone think "but now we have this new panacea, so it won't happen anymore" I can only say, don't kid yourself.
Justice in America is appallingly hap-hazard. Police are lazy. They latch onto a theory they like and make the facts fit their expectations. The lose, damage, and misinterpret evidence all the time. District Attorney's persue careers based on rates of conviction, and often have little concern for the actual guilt or innocence of those they are convicting (there have been a couple in recent memory here in Chicago who have been proven to knowingly convict innocent people, in at least one case because he was more interested in putting the scapegoat behind bars and looking good to an angry public than in serving justice).
Having served on a couple of juries, I can say from my own experience that juries are faced with severely filtered and diluted information, outright misinformation, and a great deal of emotional manipulation from both sides. Their odds of getting something right don't seem to be much higher than what we would get if we simply flipped a coin to determine guilt or innocence.
I understand people who break and run when accused of a crime they didn't commit. The prisons are full of people wrongly convicted, and the streets with people who got away scot-free (and of course the opposite is also true, the prisons are also full of guilty people correctly convicted, and the streets with people justly acquited). It is an utter crapshoot as to whether or not you are correctly found guilty or notguilty, or incorrectly found notguilty or guilty, and this guy got incredibly lucky.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Until technology to somehow photocopy a barcode is developed, of course.
There is a reason we have rules on gathering evidence. For example, going into someone's financial records without anything more than a hunch is just that.
I've been saying for years that investigative techniques for computer crime are insufficient - maybe it's across the board.
Think it would help if we pulled shows like CSI and Law&Order off the air?
- You don't need to present a shred of identification to get a card -- you don't even have to give the right address, since they give it to you right when you apply for it.
- You don't even need an actual card -- stores will allow you to enter a phone number in place of swiping the card -- and there's no way for them to know if you enter the right number.
If this was critical evidence in their case, they didn't have a case. (In which case, it's no surprise they jumped on the 3rd party who came forward to confess).150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Many people spend months in jail while awaiting trial. So it's also a problem with the judicial system.
That was not the case here, but even if you're not in jail, the prospect of jail is a very stressful and disruptive experience: You need to appear in court multiple times, and perhaps pay for lawyers and bail. It also destroys relationships and careers, so it's really a problem with society as a whole.
For those who haven't been on a jury, this case illustrates how easily people can get tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. This particular case is more the exception than the rule unfortunately: exonerating evidence in the form of a confession got him off the hook. Plenty more people get sent to jail for long hauls on far less evidence here in the US. Then consider the death penalty cases...
Loyalty programs don't necessarily mean higher prices. Our hardware store uses a loyalty program in order to offer special prices and rebates to our top customers. Our prices did not go up when we started the program, and we still run occasional sales that don't require a loyalty card. We ask for an address on the card application so we can mail the rebate check. We ask for a birthday (month only, and it's optional) so we can send a $10 certificate redeemable that month. Yes, if we wanted to we could discover who bought a plunger to clear their stopped up toilet, or who bought paint chemicals that could be used to make drugs. However, we also can look up your sale so you can return something even if you lost the receipt. We can reprint a receipt quickly if you need it for your taxes or a warranty repair.
Obviously you give up a bit of information to gain some benefit, and that's the case in a myriad of things we do each day. You provide info for credit card applications, job applications, drivers license applications, purchasing items online, etc.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Don't even give them your name and address. I've got a loyalty card from one of the major supermarkets here in the southwestern US. They ofered me the form and the card at the same time. I told them I didn't have time to fill it out now, so they told me to just return the form next time I was in. So I walked out the door and threw the form in the trash. The next time I was there, they swiped my card and I got all the discounts.
And they don't even know that I exist.
What is your penile percentile?
I'd hate to see what my Safeway shopping card would get me arrested for.
i read that title as "boson argon arrest"
i was quite interested until i realized my mistake...now it's just boring arson.
IANAL, but by themselves, records from these cards should not even be considered probable cause, given the the complete lack of any kind of authentication. At the Safeway by my house in Maryland, you can just punch in your phone number, no questions asked.
This is not necessarily a problem with the cards themselves--it is a problem with the misuse of the raw data at the wrong level of granularity. The point of supermarket loyalty cards is to find trends that can be used for marketing purposes. As such, the standard of accuracy for any *individual transaction* is not necessarily that stringent, because what counts is the *aggregate* after individual errors cancel out. The probability for error with any individual transaction is too high to throw someone in jail over that alone, even temporarily.
Perhaps there's a case for wrongful arrest here, given the way that the charges seemed to rely entirely on the abuse and misinterpretation of data. More likely, though, the man should consider suing Safeway for damages stemming from mis-representing the data to the police in a way that construed more accuracy to individual transactions than it deserves.