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2-Year ID Theft Investigation Yields 86 Arrests; 25 More Sought
angry tapir writes with this bit from TechWorld: "Prosecutors call it the biggest identity theft bust in U.S. history. 111 bank tellers, retail workers, waiters and alleged criminals were charged with running a credit-card-stealing organization that stole more than $US13 million in less than a year-and-a-half. 'This is by far the largest — and certainly among the most sophisticated — identity theft/credit card fraud cases that law enforcement has come across,' the Queens County District Attorney's office said in a statement announcing the arrests."
It's not theft, if you still have the ability to use the identity. I just made a copy.
What, why are so mad at me?
It's not stealing, it's just making a copy. The original person still has his/her identity left.
So? Both you and the seller have agreed to it.
This significantly improves my opinion of banks. I knew that they were full of the kind of people who would hold the economy hostage and demand a bailout from the federal government because they were too big to fail. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would robo-sign documents fraudulently, sometimes causing families to be kicked out of their houses by mistake. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would convince working people to sign mortgages that the banks knew they could never repay, based on income information that the banks knew was fraudulent.
Now I find out that that isn't the only kind of person who works at banks. There are apparently some who aren't criminal masterminds, just workaday crooks. Small-time white-collar criminals who deal with Russian gangsters during the week to make an extra buck, but on the weekends go home and coach their kids' soccer teams. Very refreshing.
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as long as identity has value.
We have too much identity. Alleged identity does not assure good intentions or good funds.
The powers that be have been incessantly pushing more identity on us and all it's done is create more identity theft and identity abuse (often from marketers).
We should be moving to chip and pin, a proof of knowledge scheme, rather than this nonsense based on numbers which must be kept secret from thieves but shared with the whole world to do business, and names, an information commodity passed around more than a joint at a Dead concert.
Why should a card be billed by name and number? Are either relevant to assuring funds transfer? No. The only thing which should matter is a positive response from the merchant's bank confirming funds transfer.
A user-friendly payment system would give the merchant neither the name of the person using the secure card nor any unique identifying number. The response should be either VALID $x.yy or INVALID.
Our current payment system was designed by bankers, marketers, and politicians, and it shows.
If it were designed by security experts this would not be a problem.
the subprime RMBS, the Credit Default Swap market.... those were trillions of dollars... a single CDO deal could be worth a billion dollars... and law enforcement some how did not "come across" it.
if you want to know why, three of the best books are Confidence Game by Christine S Richard and The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman and EConned by Yves Smith. Another good resource is the film Inside Job by Charles Ferguson.
white-collar law enforcement is flat out corrupted, with guys who head regulatory agencies going soft on big financial institutions, and then getting hired by those institutions a year or two later.
the Synthetic CDO market has been called the biggest ponzi scheme in history, by Janet Tavakoli (who wrote three textbooks on structured finance). and insiders in the industry, like Gregg Lippman of Deutschebank, called it similar names, as revealed by the Levin Coburn senate committee hearings. You can find books like Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lehman bond trader Lawrence McDonald (and Patrick Robinson) who flat out call CDS "gambling". and then there is Lang Gibson , high up in Merrill Lynch's CDO business, who wrote an entire book called 'Lost Trust' about it. Then there is Tetsua Ishikawa, who wrote a novel called "How I caused the Credit Crunch" - he was an ex-Goldman Sachs guy .
Now lets not even discuss the Commodity Index Funds, or how "someone in Washington" prevented Goodman's article in a trade journal that blamed the GSCIF for manipulating market prices of commodities, or the article in Harpers that said similar things. Also lets not even go into how JP Morgan and other bailed-out banks have bought entire warehouses to hoard metals (Copper being the one JPM was caught doing), or that the head of JP Morgan's commodities business is none other than Blythe Masters - who was on the original JPM team that invented Credit Default Swaps in the 1990s.
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
As Goodman quotes a Trader in her book, about why the cops never go busting the massive cocaine deals going on in places like the New York Mercantile exchange... "[why would they want to get caught up in a shit show like that? Theyd rather be busting Pablo in Harlem]". the same principle applies to other financial crimes, like theft and fraud. Why would a regulator or cop want to get caught up in a shit show like that?
And fraud has been with us for a long, long time.
As the practices of the consumers have shifted (writing few checks, using less cash, increased credit/debit card use, on-line banking) the methods of fraud have shifted.
Unfortunately, the banks were able to also shift the "responsibility" for the fraud to the consumers.
If someone uses your identity to commit fraud then YOU are responsible for cleaning up the mess.
Even when YOU do not have any tools to PREVENT the fraud or even to be aware of it before the bank/store files a complaint against you.
I despise how these cases get treated as "identity theft" rather than "bank/CC fraud with a side of impersonation". An "identity" as it is presently constructed for financial purposes, is basically all public, or near-public information(much of it is public record, the rest is simultaneously treated as Super Secret Proof, and demanded, all the time, by basically everybody, because it is Super Secret Proof, which of course means that it is basically public, like SSNs and CC numbers...) It isn't the person whose "identity" is used to perpetrate a given frauds fault that financial institutions can't be bothered to actually verify transactions properly, although the poor bastards often get stuck with years of hassle for it anyway.
The notion of "identity theft" seems like nothing more than a cynical way to shift responsibility away from the responsible parties, and the parties who could do something about it(hey, Visa, don't want my CC getting cloned by anybody who manages to obtain the numbers visible in plaintext on the card, which have to be used to perform a transaction? Try cryptography...) and onto the suckers at the bottom of the food chain who, realistically, have very little control over the 'security' that a bunch of nearly public information connected to them is given by the large number of people who have access to it.
by CEOs and executives... which is every bit, exactly, as much stealing as swiping someones credit card. and it has gone unpunished... there is a book that came out recently about this.
then there were the Auction Rate Securities scams...
then there were the CLO based mergers and acquisitions, created only for profit of traders...
and on and on. the garden of fraud that blossomed from 1995-2008 is unprecedented in human history, and yet law enforcement wasnt able to "come across it".
the only people in jail are Bernie Madoff and that one hedge fund dude. Everyone else got away.
figure that one out.
I suspect the equipment was for forgery purposes as they also found things like blank credit cards, and I'm guessing you can't get credit-card writers off the shelf. Actually, lemme check... no, doesn't look like Amazon sells any, just the readers. After finding out Amazon sells uranium, I really wouldn't be shocked.
I agree that renting a jet is kind of stupid. I'm more surprised that, with 111 people involved, they only stole $13 million. Seems like a lot, but it's only about $117,000 per person, which considering the risk is pretty low reward. Most crime is, though, I guess.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Wrong search terms: "Magnetic Stripe Encoders" are what you are looking for.
~$300, won't handle the fancy card graphics and embossed numerals("Magnetic Stripe Card Embossers" are used for that, also perfectly licit off-the-shelf items); but will turn a card blank into something that an automated POS won't bat an eye at(and, in most cases, re-using a bank-issued card, even if the number on the card doesn't match the one on the stripe, should probably escape a retail employee's notice).
Magnetic card stock is also a legitimate off-the-shelf item, as are printers that will dump an arbitrary color image onto blanks(entirely non-suspicious, any organization that issues mag-stripe IDs probably has such a printer on the shelf somewhere.) Getting a card-stock supplier to do a large print run of cards identical to bank blanks would probably raise some eyebrows; so you would presumably have to steal or print your own.
Everything you need to produce fully functional magnetic stripe cards is fully licit, available off the shelf, and not particularly expensive. The only "secret" is the name and number prominently displayed on actual issued credit cards, and handed over during each transaction. The "chip and PIN" stuff is horribly broken; but at least it pretends to be concerned about card cloning...
The only agency I see referenced in TFA is the Queens DA. I'm guessing that this, by it's nature, would be interstate and therefor investigated by the US Secret Service. But I would expect the USSS to hand the case over to a US Attorney General for prosecution. I'll have to do some google-fu to get beyond the self aggrandizing release by the Queens DA to get a more complete story. There is no way he did this by himself. Kinda prickish not to mention the others involved.
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The only way to make an honest buck in this economy is to steal it.
Tell that to all the people holding jobs. Suprise suprise, the majority of people in this country actually have jobs where they earn livings.
Unless you intend to accuse 80+% of the country of being dishonest in their work?
Or did you really just want to inject an unrelated rant on politics into the discussion, for no good reason? If so, I hope the mods would use the correct mod of "offtopic", rather than marking a comment insightful when it offers 0 insight into the discussion at hand.
Yup it's not stealing, well at least not from the person. Nobody stole any identities, but rather a good bit of money from banks and creditors. However somehow they have managed to convince everyone that it is not the banks problem. For a comical take on this point Identity theft should not be an individuals problem but rather whatever institution that mistakenly allowed the transaction should be held responsible.
The only way to counter Identity thieves is to have really really shitty credit.
This is why I make my credit score low by being late paying credit bills, not paying other things, etc.
I have been sent to credit collectors a few times, I would pay a little then wait a year and pay a little... etc.
You want my identity? Fine... you have to work for my credit line... sucker!