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Portrait of an Identity Thief

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the getting-off-easy dept.

Ant writes to tell us that the New York Times has a closer look and an interview with an identity theft addict. From the article: "As far back as 2002, Mr. Sharma began picking the locks on consumer credit lines using a computer, the Internet and a deep understanding of online commerce, Internet security and simple human nature, obtained through years of trading insights with like-minded thieves in online forums. And he deployed the now-common rods and reels of data theft -- e-mail solicitations and phony Web sites -- that fleece the unwitting."

17 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Its remarkably easy to scam people by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The reason most people don't do it is because they're honest and want to help out the human race instead of being a drain on society.

    --
    God spoke to me.
    1. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The reason most people don't do it is because they're honest and want to help out the human race instead of being a drain on society.

      I think of myself as an honest person, but a desire to retain my freedom has also kept me from straying into a life of crime. And whether or not a need to be honest is universal I don't know, but I suspect the deterrent of prison is enough to keep most people straight. Lots of us have the skills and opportunities to commit some fairly lucrative crimes, though we choose not to, for whichever reason.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
    2. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by Korin43 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Considering how much money could be made through illegal means and how easily, morals are a much more important deterrent than the police. The police are the back up plan ;)

    3. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I know... what a joke... an 'identify theft addict'. What, is stealing someone's identity this year's new black/bipolar? It's not a fucking mental illness.

    4. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Insightful
      what invariably happens when ordinary citizens are left with only their own morals to keep them honest - and it ain't pretty.

      True. They tend to form governments to get themselves organised, and it all goes downhill from there.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    5. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by MBCook · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Everything is a mental illness.

      If it is a mental illness, that means two things. It's not your fault (hint: it is), and it's a condition (hint: thus insurance must pay). No one in America has problems. Those would be their fault and they would have to pay a shrink to talk about them. But if you make it an illness...

      What was that one that was "discovered" last month? Intermittent Explosive Disorder, aka "a really short temper."

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    6. Re:Its remarkably easy to scam people by JavaRob · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Most religions have some notion of an afterlife of pain or punishment, or karmic balance, or some such - i.e. consequences.
      More importantly, doing "bad" things tends to have much more immediate consequences. Most immoral things are "bad" because you are harming someone else. Someone who will, in all likelihood, not be very happy about it, and will try to:
      1) stop you from doing it again and/or
      2) harm you in return: perhaps physically, or (for example) telling everyone what you did harms you socially.

      Of course, if you don't get caught and aren't suspected, you don't need to worry about that directly. But we're social animals; we have some instincts and passed-on skills (empathy, conscience, etc.) to help us live in cooperative groups.

      Also, any parent will tell you the importance of teaching children about right vs. wrong. Have you ever really thought about what that says about our inborn tendencies? Why would that lesson need to be taught, if we weren't essentially amoral by nature?
      That lesson needs to be taught, perhaps, because we're essentially *stupid* by nature. We've evolved into a species that passes on essential knowledge to our offspring via teaching (because it works a lot better than only passing on slowly-evolved instincts!). If you raise kids without passing on the essentials (including how to interact with others), you're sending them out into the world as cripples, and they're going to screw up a lot and be miserable. That's not their "natural state" -- normally, this knowledge would have been passed on. In the natural human state, the parent teaches the child.

      Questions like "are we essentially amoral or moral" aren't really answerable just because they don't match up well with the real situation. Morality is the "best practices" we've figured out over time: how to live and cooperate with other people with a minimum of frustration and fighting. A kid might figure out some of that stuff on his own ("damn, I punch just one girl and now nobody wants to talk to me..."), just like he might figure out a hammer is for hitting things with... but without teaching, he's not going to master it any more than he'd master driving a car out into traffic if he found one sitting in the garage one day.

      Further, look at how that lesson is taught. Do we teach our children to avoid being bad simply because it's bad? Or do we teach them that being bad has consequences?
      If you teach your kid that he'll get punished when he grabs Billy's toy, he learns that *you* don't want him to grab toys. If you teach him to observe that Billy is sad when his toy is stolen, and Billy might be his friend if they share toys instead, and it feels good to have a friend... well, you're teaching him how to act even when you're not around, for starters. You're also giving him skills he can use in many other situations.
  2. Stupid Criminal? by locokamil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can anyone say... script kiddie?

    The guy is clearly dumb as a rock. Who the hell takes a stolen credit card, buys stuff with it, and then has the stuff delivered to his doorstep???!!? I don't know jack about stealing identities, but this guy's MO is just plain stoopid.

    Trust the mainstream media to make him sound like some kind of twisted, tortured genius.

    1. Re:Stupid Criminal? by Freaky+Spook · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most criminals are dumb, thats why.

      He may not be robbing liquor stores but what he is doing is till fairly petty crime, it doesn't take much intelligence to do what he does.

      Thats probably the reason why you see so many people getting caught for this stuff, any geek knows the dangers of using a stolen credit card and ways to avoid getting caught, but I'm sure most of them are too busy posting on slashdot to bother.

    2. Re:Stupid Criminal? by Pink+Tinkletini · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, most criminals who get caught are dumb. You don't hear about the smart ones--they don't get caught.

      --
      And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
  3. Addict, My Foot by PavementPizza · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's this "identity theft addict" balonium? Do you call bank robbers "bank robbing addicts"? All bad behavior is not addiction. The guy is a lowlife crook who found an easy way to make money and kept coming back to it, plain and simple.

    --
    Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
  4. Re:Yeah... by bsartist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, I got a laugh out of it. But it's kind of depressing to think about, and all too common - too many people would rather blame the tool (in this case a computer) than admit that their spouse/child/dog/whatever has done something wrong. It's sad to think that this woman might truly believe that a machine somehow corrupted her poor innocent husband and turned him to a live of evil.

    --
    Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
  5. No Remorse??? by innocence18 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did anyone else find this guys total lack of remorse in his actions a little...well...wrong!

    Not to mention this quote

    Mr. Sharma said, "because by then things have changed so much that it will be kind of hard for me to just go back in there and do everything."

    which implies that if it wasn't hard to get back in to he might consider it.

    What an ass!

    --
    Anonymity of the internet is responsible for the views expressed in my post.
  6. Addiction is a description, not an excuse by fm6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There probably are bank robbers who are addicted to what they do. The concept of "addiction" is just a model for understanding destructive behavior. It's not an attempt to excuse it. In fact, the opposite is true: people who are fighting addiction, and the people who help them (often addicts themselves) will tell you that the worst thing you can do for an addict is overlook his or her misdeeds.

  7. This guy is an idiot by humankind · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stories like this really irk me, and show how the industry wants to make the notion of identity theft much scarier than it really is. This is an example of an "identity thief?" This moron used stolen credit cards and shipped the crap to his parents' house where he lived. He's an idiot. Other people with common sense wouldn't do stupid shit like what he was doing. There's no skill involved in what he did. Any waiter or someone who handles credit cards on a daily basis could do the same thing, but they don't because they're not idiots like this guy.

    In the end, anybody he ripped off probably didn't have to pay, so it was the merchants that got screwed if anybody, and this is becoming harder and harder to pull off.

    If there's one thing this article does point out, it's that if the feds really want to stop identity theft damages, they'd shut down Western Union. That money transfer service pretty much solely exists now to play a party to scams of this nature.

  8. Re:Unravelling or being unwoven? by Nutria · · Score: 5, Insightful
    On the whole, we seem to be slowly moving from a "govern thyself" to a "If no-ones watching, why not?" frame of mind.

    I wonder if this is almost being encouraged by the powers that be as it fosters a feeling that it's ok for them to be watching because I no longer expect the others around me to be governing their own behavior...

    IMO, this devolution stems from a set of interrelated and feedback-reinforcing factors, some of which are
    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  9. Re:Unravelling or being unwoven? by G-funk · · Score: 5, Insightful
    On the whole, we seem to be slowly moving from a "govern thyself" to a "If no-ones watching, why not?" frame of mind.


    I think the main reason for that is the vast array of laws that are simply to serve corporations, not the people. Nobody's going to argue that it shouldn't be illegal to kill somebody, or break into his house, rape his wife and walk out with his TV. But with laws like the DMCA and various other corporate welfare schemes, people going to jail for weed, how can any man have respect for what's law, rather than simply live by their own ideas of what's right, and simply try to avoid being caught when those two systems aren't in harmony?
    --
    Send lawyers, guns, and money!