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ID Thief Gives Whole New Perspective
Posted on May 10, 2007 by
I found a really interesting article on ID theft that provides a whole different perspective – it’s from the ID thief’s point of view. The thief tells how he did it so that the public can learn from it (but only after he was caught).
In a nutshell, he was a meth addict and needed lots of cash. He first used a stolen checkbook to drain a victim’s bank account. Next, he found personal information on other unsuspecting individuals and made fraudulent checks that he was able to cash.
He then graduated to printing fake payroll checks with stolen account numbers which he would use at Costco to rack up thousands of dollars in goods which were easily traded for drugs.
His main source of information was from mailboxes that he would sift through in the middle of the night. He would keep going back to the same mailboxes night after night and eventually piece together enough information to get a person’s complete profile – and that’s how he’d find his next victim.
During a previous arrest he used his jail time to exchange ideas with other identity thieves so that he had more tricks to try once he was released.
Check out the article – it’s the best I’ve seen in a long time!
Filed under: Fraud, Identity Theft, Scams
Tags: checkfraud, identitytheft, idtheft, thief
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