Casablanca’s MO was to open the phone book and find names such as Myrtle or Homer that sounded like they belonged to senior citizens. She then talked her way into their homes as an investigator checking into irregularities at their banks, and in their accounts.
She flashed a badge, knew how to play the part, and people trusted her. And when she had weadled ATM numbers and credit information out of her marks, she cleaned out their accounts … and moved on to do it again and again.
Another thief contrived to get his or her paws on a prominent elected official’s Amazon.com account and immediately used it to buy a 52-inch flat-screen television.
The crime came to light by accident within hours when the victim, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, received an e-mail asking him where he wanted his television delivered.
As Satterberg reminded the Auburn Rotary last week at Grace Community Church, identity theft is a term used to describe a broad range of conduct. And anybody can be its patsy.
“There’s probably nothing more personal than your name and your identity, your credit,” Satterberg said. “When somebody steals that, yes, it’s a property crime, but it feels awfully personal and scary.”
Fueled in large part by the easy availability of credit and the widespread use of the Internet, identity thieves claim 10 million victims in the United States every year, a new one every four seconds, Satterberg said. Its victims spend an average of 175 hours recovering, calling credit unions, banks and vendors in an effort to overcome the presumption of guilt that hangs on them, Satterberg said.
King County receives about 5,000 ID theft complaints every year. By 2006, the county ranked eighth in the nation in occurrences. In 2007, it had dropped to 17th.
Satterberg said ID theft can be devilishly difficult to prosecute, doubly so when committed over the Internet because it’s not even clear what police agency will be responsible for investigating the crime.
“Banks in many cases write off the cost of fraud as the cost of doing business, because there is more than enough profit to be had in making sure everybody can buy what they want,” Satterberg said.
A lack of communication between police and financial institutions also hampers police. And when police do catch the thieves, they are ranked low on the state sentencing grid.
Satterberg noted several trends, including “phishing.” Those are the bogus webpages that arrive on your computer, seeking your personal financial information under the guise of routing out irregularities in your account.
Authorities also have seen a proliferation of cleverly-contrived scanning devices that fit snugly over regular credit card and ATM scanners, allowing the thieves to download your information.
And of course the bad guys are constantly adapting.
“One of the trends we are seeing is that ID thieves will steal an ID and sit on it for six or eight months,” Satterberg said, adding that this makes it extremely difficult for victims to determine when and where they were ripped off.
County launches program
Six months ago, hard on the heels of the establishment of a separate arm dedicated to car theft, King County gathered all of its detectives in one room to talk about the most prolific ID thieves. That meeting produced the Identity Theft Initiative Project for King County or ID Tip.
“We have started to get together regularly and have come up with people that we want to target,” Satterberg said. “The prosecutor’s office is in a unique position. We are the central repository for a lot of this information. We see a case from Des Moines, and it might also be someone who is active in Federal Way. Now we can share that information through this network and start to add cases, start to learn about people who are scamming the elderly or stealing information from your mailbox.”
Guys, he said like Two Buck Chuck, a smooth-talking con-man with a cauliflower ear, skilled at convincing baristas and convenience clerks that the $2 money order he presents is actually worth $200 because the manager, whom he always knows by name, says so. He’ll buy a few coffees for a meeting he is supposedly having and pocket the change.
There’s the 30-year-old woman who sidles up to an old man in a grocery store or at the mall, fills the lonely hole in his soul and takes him for everything he’s got.
“One of her victims was 95 years old, and after he found he had been scammed his family said his heart was broken and he just gave up on life and died shortly afterward,” Satterberg said.
“We target these top offenders and stack the offenses to make sure they get to prison. And then we can come and provide training to investigators and the prosecutors and to store folks and bank tellers to let them know what to be watching for.”
But what about Casablanca? This woman, one of the 20 names on the county’s wanted list, is looking at 13 counts of identity theft with a few more on the way.
“That should send her to prison for a while,” Satterberg said.
