ID Theft Made Easy

chiagoo writes "You may remember that 70% of the time, people will reveal their passwords for chocolate. Well, at this year's Infosecurity Europe, it was revealed that 92% of the 200 attendees surveyed would gladly trade enough information to steal their identities for a chance to win theater tickets. Social engineering at its best. Why spend time writing bots and rootkits when people will give you what you want for a piece of candy or a ticket to see The Pacifier?"

Comments

This is NOTHING

[msaulters]

I was at Wal-Mart late one night last week.

You know those self-checkout stations they have now? Each and every one of them was spitting out paper slips non-stop that were records of the day's transactions. My roommate snapped a photo.

Each and every slip had the full credit card number, the expiration date, and a copy of the cardholder's signature.

They were unattended, and the workers had placed plastic bags to catch the slips as they fell out of the machines.

There must have been hundreds...

At just one Wal-Mart...

Out of thousands of stores.

Re:This is truly sad

[stratjakt]

Theater tickets, not cinema tickets. Submitter is just an asshole.

Tickets to something like Phantom can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars for good seats, depending on the city. However, they will almost certainly get you laid.

I wouldn't even stop walking for free movie tickets.

Re:Any good info though

[Khomar]

FYI, the official city for postal code 12345 is Schenectady, NY.

Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug

[jm92956n]

I wish I had know this about a year ago.

Crobar, a giant club in Manhattan, does this. While I normally wouldn't have gone to a place like that, I was on the guest-list (read: free admission), and so I wasn't concerned at all when I handed them my license. Since then I've received numerous mailings from them. I wonder what else they're doing with my personal information.

What I've also heard since then, though I've not been able to confirm it, is that they use this information to keep track of you. If you start a problem and are kicked out of the club, it's an effective lifetime ban (though I'm not sure how they'll be able to scan your ID as they're kicking you out). Furthermore, they share this information with other clubs, so that if you start a problem in one place, you're essentially banned from every club in the area.

Never again will I allow my license to be electronically scanned. If every bar and club in town adopts this technology, I'll have to go back to drinking 40's on the stoop.