The Art of the Steal (26 page)

Obviously, a burst of good fortune like this was something that would pique a person’s interest, and it seemed plausible. There had been a lot of talk and press about proposed legislation that would pay reparations to black people. But the whole thing was nothing more than a trap set by a ring of identity thieves.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, a man posing as a jury administrator from the local court system would call people, mostly the wealthy and business owners, and say, “You’ve forgotten to respond to a summons for jury duty and face a penalty. I can straighten it out right now for you, if you just give me some basic information.” Assuming they had overlooked the summons, or it had gotten lost in the mail, the victims would unquestioningly provide their birth dates, mother’s maiden name, and Social Security numbers.

Thieves are not at all squeamish about stealing the identity of someone that recently died and resurrecting him for the purpose of spending money. This works because credit bureaus usually don’t learn about someone’s death for six to twelve months. A common place to locate the personal information necessary here is an obituary. People fail to realize the abundance of material contained in an obituary, particularly that all-important mother’s maiden name so universally used for identification means.

One pair of identity thieves stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from some two-dozen victims in seven states. Most of them were selected out of
“Who’s Who in America,”
which in its biographies of prominent Americans gives birth date, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and home address, sufficient information for them to request birth certificates and establish credit.

Recently, there was a run of identity thefts involving admirals of the U.S. Navy. One admiral complained that he had been a victim, then another admiral and another—ultimately seven in all. It happens that the thieves were digging out personal information on them from the Congressional Record. It routinely lists all the data a criminal needs to become a military officer.

One woman had her identity stolen by her boss. She was hired by the owner of a magazine publisher, and, in filling out her employment application, divulged the usual supply of personal information. Little did she know that her employer had ruined her own credit in the past and couldn’t even get a credit card. Within months of the woman being hired, her boss took out a card in her name and began using it. Who would suspect their boss? But literally anyone can be after your identity.

Years ago, I predicted that once there was a shake-out among all the dot-com startups, criminals would step in and offer to buy up the assets of failed e-commerce companies. Why would they? To get their databases, rich with personal information on customers, including credit card numbers. I bet it’s already happened. When it was functioning, the retailer Toysmart.com assured its customers that their personal information would never be shared with anyone. When it went bankrupt in May 2000, that promise went out the window. It took out ads offering to sell its database. Fortunately, a subsidiary of Walt Disney agreed to pay it fifty-thousand dollars to destroy the information before it got into the wrong hands.

NUMBERS FOR SALE

The Internet has become the equivalent of an electronic shopping mall for identity thieves. Endless websites have sprung up that sell personal information. One site, docusearch.com, will retrieve a person’s Social Security number for a mere forty-nine dollars. How long will it take? One day.

It’s all perfectly legal. They buy this information from the nineteen states that use the Social Security number for the driver’s license number. They’ll go to a driver’s license bureau and ask, how many Social Security numbers do you have? They’re told, 1.3 million. Okay, can we buy them for $8 a number? They’ll approach one of the major health insurers, with millions of numbers, and again buy them for $8 apiece. They buy numbers from collection agencies and credit bureaus, and they resell the information for $49 a number. The only thing you have to type in is the person’s name and the last-known state you believe he or she lived in, and within seconds, up comes the Social Security number. I’ve gone online a number of times to test it out and they’ve never not had the number. Try it yourself.

Another website, netdetective2000, brags that it will find out “everything you ever wanted to know about your friends, family, neighbors, employees, and even your boss!” All you do is take your mouse and click on the information you want. It’s a complete dossier: the person’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, bank, bank account number, what stocks he owns, who his stock broker is, where he works, what he does at his job, what he makes, if he has children, his children’s names, their ages, and their Social Security numbers.

If you’re wondering who’s telling them all this information, you are. When you bought a camera, there was a warranty card, and attached to that warranty card was a consumer questionnaire. Are you married, divorced, single, separated? Are you a doctor, a lawyer, a professional, a technician, or other? Do you earn between $20,000 and $50,000, $50,000 and $100,000? Do you bank at a bank, credit union, savings bank, or mutual fund house? You went right down the list answering all their questions and all of that information went into a data base. Then they turned around and sold it, and the next thing you know, it was being used against you.

There’s another website that advertises on TV called 1-800–SEARCH. They say they can find out if someone has a criminal record. Then, in a lower tone of voice, they say, “or fifty other things.” And the fifty other things are just about anything you would want to know about someone. It’s unbelievable what they know about people—practically everything down to their favorite doughnut and how they did in third-grade social studies—and I’m talking about ordinary people who think they live a private life.

Everything is for sale. A Social Security number is $49. A birth certificate is $79. A driver’s license is $90. Or if you want an entire package of documents just for the purpose of assuming someone’s identity, it goes for $2,000.

I went to the doctor the other day. It wasn’t my regular doctor, but an oral surgeon I hadn’t seen before. The receptionist had me fill out a new patient questionnaire, then she needed my Blue Cross card, which contains my Social Security number, and my driver’s license. She made copies of both, and all this was deposited in the doctor’s file. That receptionist, or the next receptionist, could easily sell that information.

In a number of instances, low-paid hospital orderlies have stolen and sold patient information. Medical records are especially attractive to identity thieves, as they contain your Social Security number, date of birth, and even a physical description. Some criminals, to help their fraud, have actually undergone plastic surgery to look more like their victim. Imagine that—someone who not only says he’s you but looks like your twin!

A twenty-three-year-old New Jersey man was surfing the Internet at the public library one day, when he happened across the site of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). There, he discovered a database of disclosure forms that public companies must file with the regulatory body. These forms contained the names of company officials and their Social Security numbers. Using the name of an official of a company who was thirty-four years older than he, he managed to gain approval for a $44,000 car loan from a major bank. He got a quote for car insurance from an online broker, then used a fraudulent MasterCard to pay for the policy. To actually buy the car, he needed proof he was the executive, so he picked up a fake birth certificate and W-2 form from a website that sold fake credentials. Then he went and bought a new Prelude. Because the executive had such excellent credit, the thief actually negotiated better financing from the car dealer than he had from the bank.

SHADOW OF YOURSELF

Once your identity has been stolen, everything doesn’t just return to normal. You’ll find yourself inconvenienced long after the culprit is caught. After she had been victimized, one woman put an alert with the credit agencies that if anyone applied for credit in her name, she had to be called and told about it. Months afterward, she was shopping for Christmas gifts and decided to buy her son a TV at an electronics store. Since you got a discount if you opened a credit account with the store, she tried to do so. The salesperson went to process it, only to come back and tell her, he was sorry, he couldn’t extend her credit because there was nobody at her home when he called. Of course not, she said, I’m here talking to you. Well, he said, your credit bureau says I have to speak to you at your home before I can issue credit. So she had to drive home, take his call, then drive back.

A highly placed corporate executive had his identity stolen by a major drug dealer. These days, when the executive travels overseas, he has to carry an official letter with him that states that he is not the drug dealer. He’ll always have to carry that letter with him. His life has been irrevocably changed.

I read about a woman writer who had her Social Security number stolen while she was living overseas. Using her name and number, the thief ordered telephone service in California, ran up thousands of dollars in bills, and then vanished without paying them. When the writer returned to the United States and applied to rent an apartment in New York, the landlord found she had a negative credit rating and wouldn’t rent her the apartment. She had to take a sublet while she tried to get to the bottom of things.

She filed a police report. The cop who handled the case said he got an average of four complaints of identity theft a day. Not until she threatened to sue the collection agency charged with her case, did the agency relent and agree to correct her rating. It told her, however, that it might take as many as ninety days before her credit was restored at the national credit agencies. Four years later, the unpaid bills remained on her rating. She was still unable to rent an apartment.

An elderly woman went into the hospital for cancer surgery. While she was there, her daughter hired some cleaners because she wanted her mother to come home to a perfectly clean house. Not long afterward, the mother got a succession of calls from collection agencies. The cleaners had found enough personal information in the house to steal her identity. During the long ordeal of trying to straighten the mess out, the woman lost her house.

There was a man who worked as a salesman in a department store in California. One day he had his wallet stolen, which contained his driver’s license, Social Security card, and military ID. Seven months after his wallet was stolen, he was called into the firm’s main security office and told he had been caught shoplifting at one of the chain’s other stores. He had done no such thing. In fact, he had been working in his usual store at the time. He even produced a letter from his boss confirming that. Still, he was fired. The man who had stolen his wallet had assumed his identity and done the shoplifting.

He got other jobs, but was dogged by the crimes of the thief. He’d apply for a job, a check would be done on him, and he’d be told, sorry, his services weren’t needed. He later found out from the police that the rap sheet in his name included arrests for shoplifting, burglary, and arson. He went bankrupt. He lost his home. Finally, he legally changed his name to distance himself from the identity theft, but his life is only a shadow of what it once was.

As you can see, the financial losses are only part of what the victim suffers. Often, it’s the emotional toll that’s most debilitating. For even if the thief is caught and prosecuted, it can take months and even years of painstaking effort to recover the good credit standing that was so quickly destroyed. At a Congressional hearing on identity theft, one victim recounted her ordeal after being victimized for $110,000: “We had to submit handwriting samples to twenty different merchants; we had to submit notarized documents and affidavits. It was like filling out our tax return twenty times with twenty different sets of instructions.”

AN IDENTITY THEFT QUIZ

As with all fraud, prevention is the most valuable step you can take against identity theft. Police are not sufficiently trained to investigate this crime and jurisdiction is often a problem, since you may live in Maine and the person who stole your identity may be in Idaho. I understand the FBI has been speaking to local police departments and asking them what they want from the FBI. The police tell them that they can handle local drug problems really well. What they can’t handle is if someone walks in and says he or she is a victim of identity theft. So they want the FBI to get more involved in white-collar crime, and I think you’ll see that start to happen in the years to come. Right now, though, it’s hard to get the attention of the FBI, because it usually requires a threshold of $250,000 before it tackles a fraud case. There are 13,500 FBI agents in the world, and only 3,000 are assigned to financial crimes.

The best thing you can do is to count on yourself. I devised a little identity theft quiz to give yourself to determine how susceptible you are. Each of the following statements represents a possible avenue for ID theft. If any of them describes you, add the points to your score.

•   You receive several offers of pre-approved credit every week (5 points). Add five more if you don’t shred them before putting them in the trash.

•   You carry your Social Security card in your wallet (10 points).

•   You don’t have a post office box or a locked, secured mailbox (5 points).

•   You drop off your outgoing mail at an open, unlocked box or basket (10 points).

•   You carry your military ID in your wallet at all times (10 points).

•   You don’t shred or tear banking and credit information when you throw it in the trash (10 points).

•   You provide your Social Security number whenever asked (10 points). Add five points if you provide it orally without checking to see who might be listening.

•   You’re required to use your SSN as an employee or student ID number (5 points).