Staff Writer
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| An evidence bag full of identity theft equipment used to steal credit card information/ Photo by Krista Daly |
“Thieves just keep getting better and better at it,” Kery German, a Palmdale crime prevention officer, said. “As soon as we combat one thing, they come back with something else.”
Senior Investigators Clint Dragoo and Joel Grenier, from the High Tech Unit of the Los Angeles County District Attorney Office, gave the first seminar on “Identity Theft, Schemes, Scams and Cons,” and Jennifer Findley, an Information Security Analyst, later presented on “Phishing and Pharming.”
“Every person who willfully obtains personal identifying information such as your name, birthdate, social security number, driver’s license number, and uses that information for an unlawful purpose [is an identity thief],” Grenier said. It could be “anybody and everybody.”
If your information is stolen, suspects can raid your bank account, get credit cards or loans in your name, collect your Social Security benefits without your knowledge, and even assume your identity when they get arrested. It’s possible for someone to be victimized for years and not even know it.
Apart from stealing your purse or wallet, there are multiple ways your identity can be stolen. Organized crime groups often use drug addicts to go dumpster diving in exchange for money, according to Grenier, and not even locked community mailboxes are safe from theft. With filesharing or LimeWire software, criminals can capture your information off your hard drive―especially if you do your taxes online.
Your identity can be stolen with the swipe of a debit or credit card, a form of identity theft called “skimming.” Criminals attach their own card scanners to ATMs, Redbox DVD rental machines and gas pumps, and hide a camera nearby to get your PIN. Identity thieves have even switched the PIN entry device inside gas stations with one of their own, and then stolen it back a week later with all of the customers’ information stored on it.
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| Identity thieves can take your credit card information by placing their own machines in stores/ Photo by Krista Daly |
“Now crooks have Bluetooth technology and can access their devices remotely,” Grenier said.
One person who attended the seminar had already been a victim of identity theft. Pat Okawa said that three years ago she treated three friends to a lunch at Marie Callender’s in Santa Rosa, Calif. “Somehow the waitress got a hold of my numbers,” Okawa said, and “a month later unauthorized charges showed up on my bill.”
Okawa said she didn’t call the credit card company until the second month, however, and it took over a year for everything to get straightened out, “all because of one person who fed me to the sharks.”
According to the Federal Trade Commission, fraud losses totaled $1.52 billion with identity theft as the leading cause.
“It’s hard to say what’s safe anymore,” Dragoo said.
Grenier and Dragoo talked about several cases they’ve worked on in which gang members were paying off bank tellers at places such as Bank of America or Wells Fargo to give out their high-profile clients’ information.
“Criminals are either getting smarter or they’re getting lazy,” Grenier said. “They don’t want to have to go out to a bank and rob it at gunpoint; that’s a lot of years in prison. They can raid your account at home on their computer drinking their latte.”
One form of identity theft most people come in contact with every day is online “phishing,” where a person pretends to be someone trustworthy in an email to get a victim’s usernames, passwords, bank account and credit card details. Most people spam it without another thought, but “if they catch just one person, they’ve made their money for the day,” Findley said.
“Always pay attention to the address bar,” Findley said. “Be cautious about links you aren’t expecting. Never assume a message or post is from who it says it is.”According to Findley, the number of phishing attacks on social networks went from 8.3 percent of phishing scams overall in Jan. 2010 to 84.5 percent in Jan. 2011.
Findley said suspects go onto social networks and find out as much information about you as they can―your name, birthdate, where you live, your dog’s name―anything to crack your usernames and passwords.
It’s increasingly popular to use mobile devices for things like social networking and online banking, but Findley said it is also much more dangerous since “there’s a greater risk of loss or theft, it’s more difficult to verify what’s in your address bar and it’s harder to filter spam without antivirus on your phone.”
Grenier and Dragoo showed how identity theft not only affects the victim, it affects everyone. Even if it does not happen to you directly, you end up paying for it with increased business costs, higher interest rates and a general lack of trust in the community for both consumers and business owners, Grenier said.
And, according to Grenier and Dragoo, it’s not easy to trace this kind of criminal since they almost always go out of state, cross jurisdictional lines and can even bounce off of computers in places like Nigeria so that their IP address can’t be tracked.
“It takes time to find out it happened, report it, there’s a complex trail to follow with lots of criminal activity and it’s possible that the suspect may really be a victim whose identity was stolen,” Grenier said.
Crime is accelerating at a high rate, and “the judicial system is not heavy on these guys,” Grenier said, due to California’s prison realignment put into effect in Oct. 2011.
“What we don’t want to do is cause some kind of paranoia,” Dragoo said. “We have to give people our information in order to buy cars, get credit cards and go to the doctor. But we can be more diligent about the people we do business with.”
There are steps you can take to protect yourself and become a harder target.
“We really recommend credit cards instead of debit cards,” Dragoo said, since the burden of proof is on you alone with a debit card, but credit card companies will fight to get their money back.
Some tips Dragoo and Grenier offered were: guard your social security number and never carry your card with you, shred before you toss, guard your incoming and outgoing mail or consider getting a P.O. Box, keep personal files in a secure place and get a free credit report from TransUnion, Equifax or Experian every year.
For online security, Findley said to use different passwords and change them every six months, use antivirus, be careful with applications and downloads, never use a public wireless service for online banking, enable remote locate and wipe for your phone in case it is stolen or lost and always look at the whole address bar to ensure you are on a legitimate site.
“Treat your information as gold,” Grenier said. “Act as soon as something’s wrong. Don’t wait.”
