3 Notes From the Identity Underground
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to swipe again through his own “skimmer” or for outsiders who’ve rigged the machine to capture personal data. Meanwhile, the growing use and trade of crystal meth seem to be additional vectors for the epidemic. Although there has been no research so far to confirm it, the CATCH team is convinced of a correlation between meth use and ID crime. Aside from the obvious urgency the substance evokes—the addicts’ drive for more drugs, more money—which leads them to steal identities, there’s also the nature of ID crime itself, to which meth addicts may be unusually well suited. Laboriously photographing, printing and laminating drivers’ licenses; keeping elaborate spreadsheets of used numbers and expiration dates; ordering goods on the Internet—tweakers can be good at such things and have plenty of time for them. “Some of these people are up three days straight,” says Fred. “What else can you do at two in the morning?” Other factors making things worse are the difficulty of tracking down the perpetrators, the challenge of prosecuting them, and the extreme weakness of penalties even when a suspect is found guilty. When someone reports a strange withdrawal from a savings account, how do you begin to find the villain? ID theft takes place almost entirely in the ether, under layers of anonymity. Investigating it can lead into other jurisdictions and frequently right out of the country, where foreign law enforcers aren’t interested in cooperating with the United States. “We’re still at the early stages of developing good relationships with overseas agencies,” says Paul Luehr, a former federal attorney who has prosecuted cases of online extortion, Internet auction fraud, and terrorism among others. As a measure of that development, he says ironically, “I’ve gotten a Scotland Yard detective out of bed in the middle of the night, and he didn’t even yell at me.” Such far-reaching searches can be endless. “It takes more time to do an ID theft investigation,” says Fred, “than to do a typical homicide.” Then, even when suspects are in custody, to get them convicted you need to do reams of work to prove a substantial amount of damage. With drug crimes, it’s easy: In Pennsylvania, for instance, possession of about $200 worth of heroin brings a minimum sentence of one year, but an ID-theft defendant has to steal about $100,000 to get the same. And for prosecutors to prove those kinds of losses, they may need 50 victims who’ll each testify about the $2,000 charge on their Visa. Finding those victims, tying them to the case, and convincing them to show up in court is an arduous task. Judges, DAs, and police chiefs throughout the justice system rightly decry spending such resources on a non-violent crime. |
Tweakers |
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And say you get one of these rare convictions; sentencing for ID theft is light. Typically, even on a second or third offense, terms run about 120 days, which drives the CATCH team nuts. Fred once found a letter from an inmate that bragged, “I will have to return to custody for 47 days!! Is that crazy? I couldn’t believe it, I got long love from that judge!! So since I could do 47 days standing on my head, I’m already out here doing what I was doing when I got busted.” While some 22 bills dealing with the crime have been introduced in Congress since January, many of them addressing sentencing, the legal community still has no clear picture of how to create practical and reasonable deterrents. “These guys,” Fred says of ID offenders, “have no fear of the justice system.” * * *What makes CATCH’s ID theft task force stand out is that its approach transcends at least a few of these obstacles. And this is where Fred’s creativity and focus have earned him the respect of his fellows: Back in 2001, he came up with a method of investigating the crime that no one had tried, an approach that vastly improved the chances of solving cases, getting suspects arrested, and eventually getting them off the streets. A small man, with a slight, wiry build, Fred possesses the authority and steadfastness of a man twice his size. From the time he became a cop (he began as a “chippie” for the CHP, California Highway Patrol) relatively late in life, and suffered “the snotty-nosed kids” drilling him at the police academy, Fred was already on the high road. He’d been a successful computer engineer for 10 years and then had the guts to make a life change. Later, as a narc for the seven years leading up to this current assignment, he proved to himself, if he hadn’t already, that he wasn’t lacking nerve. “I bought my share of dope in the LA streets under cover,” he remembers. At 46, his hair is still perfectly black, setting off his dark wide-set eyes. “You want to come home at the end of the day, but there’s only so much you can do about it.” More than fearlessness marks Fred as this group’s rightful leader though. He also possesses a powerful, innate competence. Fred can fix things. Not just a crashed computer or the old cars he has at home and likes to tinker with, but also office systems, investigative methods, work procedures. Had he himself turned out to be a “three percenter”—his appellation for someone in the consistent portion of the populace that commits crimes—Fred would have been the thoughtful, meticulous kind of drug dealer who never gets busted. As one colleague put it, “Fred’s got a purity of intention. You need guys like him, who are willing to push through a lot of bullshit to get the right thing done.” His former boss calls him a “hitting-the-pavement kind of investigator.” Fred’s strategy for investigating identity theft yielded successes from the start. “We were making arrests left and right,” he remembers, “so other agencies started sending people. They wanted in on it.” CATCH’s Art Liggins, for instance, a parole officer and cop, actually volunteered to participate, adding the CATCH work to the 40 hours he already spends in his department. Today, Fred’s small team averages more than three ID-theft arrests every week. It took the Detroit Metro task force more than two years to make 39. In the year ending July 2005, the CATCH’s nine-member group made 213 arrests, resulting in 139 convictions. In a comparable time, the FBI—with its 500 offices around the world—convicted 428. Here’s how they do it. Rather than working reactively, tracking backward from a victim’s report of a crime, Fred, Ray, Ken and the others take advantage of a legal tool called a “fourth waiver.” The term refers to the Fourth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6 Next |
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