Internet creates a chain of ID theft victims
Last year, Chris Hansen, from Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series, went underground with an identity theft investigator to get a look at the role the internet plays in identity theft.
What they discovered goes way beyond the common phishing scams.
To gain the inside track, they started with some “stolen” credit cards of their own, by having a cooperative bank issue fake credit cards with $1,000 limits. Then they offered the information from those cards, along with manufactured identities, to users of an online chat room known to cater to identity thieves.
Within seconds, the credit card accounts were sold for $5 a piece. Within minutes the accounts were maxed out with internet purchases made all over the world. In fact, by the next day, fraudulent purchases could be tracked to every continent except Antarctica.
The next question was, where does the merchandise go? To find out, they set up a fake delivery service to deliver the merchandise to the “ship to” addresses.
What they found was that the recipients hadn’t placed the orders themselves, but had agreed to take delivery of the merchandise—mostly electronics and jewelry. In all three of the cases Dateline followed, the person taking delivery said they were doing it for a fiancé. And in all three cases, the “fiancé” was someone they met over the internet.
In one case, the “fiancé” claimed to be a wealthy, self-employed beauty queen from Australia. The pictures “she” posted on the internet and the stories “she” told were convincing enough that the man who planned to marry her invested $40,000 of his own money to ship the merchandise he received to “buyers” in Africa.
What the Dateline investigation showed was that the internet is a playground for identity thieves, and identity theft victimization doesn’t stop with the card holder.
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