Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
This is a self selected sample of people who were stupid enough to get caught. The sophisticated ones generally don't get caught, or at least not so quickly.
i have a store credit card that my wife uses once every few months to buy something. usually baby clothes. a lot of times the card is in the drawer and she would just go the store and tell them my name and they would find the card in the system and ring up the sale. now she says they want to know identifying information like driver's license expiration date, SSN, birthday, etc. she asked about this and they said that they were losing too much money to ID theft.
back in 2006 and 2007 no one cared since business was good. when a recession hits you start to look at every penny you can save
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.
No, but that's like saying theft is a mundane crime that requires few technical skills. You'd be right -- the majority of those caught are unsophisticated and generally of low intelligence. The only other common traits is that they're generally desperate and were presented with an opportunity. But if they are organized and sophisticated, like say the mafia, or botnet authors -- those very few people who have refined their skills and moved beyond immediate opportunity and are refining their methodology are capable of far, far, more. And the police are ill-equipped to deal with this sophistication because most people who reach that level of competency have researched police investigation methods -- by trolling the same public records this report did and figured out what the common pitfalls are.
Professional criminals may make up a minority per capita, but their "take" is orders of magnitude higher, and risk exposure orders of magnitude lower.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Having worked in retail and foodservice industry, I hate checks. I'm flabbergasted that any retail outlets still take them.
The rate of fraudulent checks accepted at retail is astronomical; in foodservice it's even worse. The last check-accepting restaurant I worked at that had nearly a 50% rate of fraud on them; mostly from checks being written against closed accounts. The vast majority of these bad checks we never saw a cent from.
The corporate office required that we accept checks as a form of payment; they were located in some rural ghost town, where debit card use still hasn't caught on, and set national policy based on that. In a modern urban area, Visa/MC logo'd debit cards have all but replaced paper checks, and the only people who still use them are the fraudsters.
Checks are terrible, for both those using them and those accepting them.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.