2 Notes From the Identity Underground
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of the San Diego-based Computer and Technology Crime High-Tech Response Team (CATCH), of which Fred’s ID-theft task force is a key part. “But I personally have yet to see the person who became a millionaire from it.” Evidence from the paltry number of ID-theft arrests that law enforcement has managed to make suggests that the crime—both the filching of data and then using it to produce cash—takes bizarre and varying forms. It can happen anywhere: on the streets; in the world of international organized crime; and everyplace in between. Some incidents are straightforward. A victim looks at his Visa bill, say, and finds a mysterious charge at Copeland’s Sports or Best Buy, and he can readily imagine the kid a few towns over who found that wallet he’d lost. But consider that the credit-industry lost $52 billion to ID theft last year. That’s $142 million each day, which lost wallets and fraudulent Nike purchases simply can’t account for. * * *The arrests Fred’s team made that August morning were a couple points scored in a cat-and-mouse game that CATCH had been playing for months already. It began with a question from a regular patrol officer to Ken Nelson, who is SDPD’s contribution to CATCH. The officer had pulled over a motorist for an illegal left turn and gotten an inkling that the paper and ID cards he found in the car might be shady. He showed them to Ken. “What do I have?” he asked. “Ah, about 10 felonies,” Ken told him. Although the motorist had walked away with a traffic ticket, the patrolman had impounded his car for improper registration, and Ken searched the documents left in it. Clearly, the suspect, Paul Tagalog, had been hotel hopping, using various credit card accounts to reserve rooms through Priceline or hotels.com. When CATCH put the hotels Tagalog had scammed on alert, one of them contacted the team just four days later. Tagalog was back. Inside his hotel room, according to CATCH: a loaded semi-automatic weapon, 8 grams of methamphetamine, packaging materials for selling the drugs, printouts of hotel reservation confirmations under false names, stolen checks, and a self-storage receipt with another false name on it. All of this was enough to put their perp in jail, but the CATCH team is dedicated to broadening investigations or, ideally, “moving up the chain,” as they say, referring to the hierarchy of criminals. CATCH does it’s business among the low- to mid-level elements of ID crime, among the lone offenders usually supporting a substance addiction and the entrepreneurial dealers or small rings who often supply them. The team’s most effective busts involve finding “a central point of compromise”—one individual who’s dispensing names to numerous lower-level thieves, usually an employee insider who is handing out company records. To reach that hub, if it happens at all, often takes tying together multiple cases. So, the CATCH team followed the lead of the leased storage unit. Inside this time: about 2,000 documents, stuffed into a bag, recording the payments of 2,000 guests at the Staybridge Suites 20 miles north of downtown San Diego. Somehow, says CATCH, Tagalog had gotten hold of the records of a high-end corporate lodger. Unable to identify the original source of the hotel records, the team worked another angle which could at least advance the investigation laterally, using victims to connect dots. Probation officer Ray Juanengo, a 36-year-old former art history major, with a shaved head and goatee, began calling Staybridge Suites customers to find out if they’d suffered any thefts lately. One former hotel guest had recently discovered that an expensive pair of jeans from Nordstroms had been charged to his credit card. “We got an anticipatory search warrant,” says Ray, “where if the receiving party accepts the stolen merchandise, you have probable cause.” So, dressed in a DHL uniform, Ray approached a small stucco bungalow with the delivery. A young woman came to the door and took the package in her hands, at which point Ray signaled to the others, and six members of the ID theft team burst from a nearby parked van. They ordered the woman to freeze and began a search of the premises. Inside, they report: a $2,000 ring, several guys on parole, and an Old Navy bag stuffed with profiles of Staybridge Suites guests. The judge sent the young woman home with three years probation. She was Mary Rivera, whom CATCH would arrest for a second time come August. * * *Poking around in the complex marketplace of stolen identities is not something most detectives have the time or know-how to do, but the CATCH team—which includes Fred’s nine-person identity-theft subgroup—is not a run-of-the-mill law enforcement operation. Even in California, which is already at the forefront of response to this crime with its law mandating companies to disclose privacy breaches, the San Diego-based task force is considered the best in the state. Which doesn’t mean they’re eradicating identity theft, but means they’re at least making headway. |
“In narcotics,” says Fred, |
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There are a number of reasons why this is so hard to do. First off, the crime is so easy to commit. With the average American household carrying one dozen credit cards; with banks pushing insta-credit that requires no data verification; with desktop publishing technology that makes counterfeiting IDs as straightforward as baking cookies; and with an economy addicted to the evermore efficient flow of data—the opportunities for committing this crime are profuse. Unlike narcotics, identification data is created instantaneously and reproduced infinitely. “In narcotics,” says Fred, who spent years there, “you have a commodity that is isolated and groups who can control it. But with identity theft, anybody can steal. No one can control this material.” Like so many modern phenomena, identities are cheap and dispensable and circulated continuously. We leave traces of them everywhere we go, and lawbreakers know it. “Fishing blue boxes” is a popular way to find them, for instance, which means lowering a weight with a sticky substance on it into the mailbox on the street corner at night and pulling up hundreds of envelops. Or if that doesn’t work, says Fred, offenders “just yank the thing off its pedestal and take it somewhere to break into.” Hospital employees, telemarketers, airline clerks—insiders in every field—siphon away identities and feed them to associates. Ordinary burglars who used to go after stereos now stage break-ins just for the data. “We’ve seen people,” says Fred, “who break into a car, pull the credit card, and put everything back into place, so they can use the card for a while.” And every swipe of a card’s magnetic strip is an opportunity for a salesperson Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6 Next |
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