Identity Theft Is Usually an Unsophisticated Crime

apatrick writes "A recent research report by Heith Copes (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Lynne Vieraitis (University of Texas at Austin) has examined identity thieves and their methods. Copes and Vieraitis searched federal court records in the US for people convicted of identity theft and then tried to find out where they were serving their sentences. They were able to find 297 inmates, from which they sampled 59 inmates in 14 prisons across the country. The convicts agreed to do detailed interviews, in private, to talk about themselves and their crimes, and the results are reported in a recent issue of Criminal Justice Review. According to Copes and Vieraitis, 'it is best categorized as an economic crime committed by a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds through a variety of legitimate (e.g., mortgage broker) and illegitimate (e.g., burglar) occupations.' As to the issue of whether these are white-collar criminals, the authors say: 'Despite public perceptions of identity theft being a high-tech, computer driven crime, it is rather mundane and requires few technical skills. Identity thieves do not need to know how to hack into large, secure databases. They can simply dig through garbage or pay insiders for information. No particular group has a monopoly on the skills needed to be a capable identity thief.'"

Comments

Capable...?

[esocid]

No particular group has a monopoly on the skills needed to be a capable identity thief.

Being a successful identity thief, however, is a different story, I believe. Measuring that success by remaining uncaught. It's ridiculous how much of the information necessary to "steal" someone's identity is easily available, without needing to dig very deep. The hardest part would be SS#, but even then it's not that hard to get, considering how often someone asks for mine, and refuses to take anything else.Having lost my entire wallet once, I called the 3 credit monitoring groups and put a fraud watch on it, or whatever it is they called it, and I really think it should be standard. It requires that they contact you personally to verify any new openings of credit cards.

If you're in jail, you're unsophisticated

[gilgongo]

Anyone who thinks ID theft and the mechanisms used to achieve it are unsophisticated, badly needs to read this (700K PDF). Badly.