4 Notes From the Identity Underground
|
|||
| |||
| |
Amendment, which protects citizens from unwarranted search and seizure. The waiver is frequently offered to offenders who agree to allow supervisors to check their behavior in exchange for probation or parole. “For example, often one of the conditions of parole,” says computer crimes legal expert Scott Christie, “is to submit to searches of one’s bodily fluids for drug testing.” Yet, even if required to regularly show up in offices for appointments, even if subjected to body searches, financial offenders don’t reveal any traces of new crimes. And the reality is that non-violent probationers get practically no follow-up anyway. There are some 25,000 non-violent probationers in San Diego County alone, among them fraud perpetrators, who almost never come into contact with supervisors. No one follows up to see they are complying with the terms that got them released from custody. “These fraud people have been going unchecked for years,” says Fred. So Fred’s idea was to leverage the fourth waiver with ID thieves. Each week, he and the team sift out from their lists of thousands of probationers and parolees about 10 that have involvement in ID theft and have signed fourth waivers. Then, the task force goes out on what they call “knock and talks”—they show up unexpectedly at the offender’s home, and they search. About 60 percent of the time, they find the ID thieves are repeating the crime. “We are very unconventional the way we operate,” Fred explains, “with the mindset that we’re going to be proactive. Most fraud detectives have stacks of cases that land on their desks.” They’re bogged down with reports from irate victims who find out their credit score is too low to open Macy’s accounts. “We have the luxury where we rarely take those. We go out and discover cases.” Scott Christie, who worked for the US DOJ as an attorney on several major ID-theft cases, thinks the methodology is impressive. “It’s a shrewd maneuver,” he comments, “a very creative use of the fourth waiver.” Plus, he adds, “It’s a good tactic for getting intelligence in the process.” Others in the legal community, however, think this good tactic isn’t necessarily a fair one. Taking people by surprise in their private homes, especially with guns drawn and doors busted in, is the kind of behavior cops are hated for. There’s a fine line between testing compliance and abusing power. Indeed, some federal courts have refused to consider evidence gathered in fourth-waiver searches because they deemed the procedure violated basic rights. Mike Groch, one of the founders of CATCH, concedes that the approach might be “big brother-ish.” “But if law enforcement is using it to badger,” he says, “there are remedies for that.” Which Fred certainly grasps: “Crooks have a lot of rights,” he says knowingly. “The defense can easily see harassment.” Nonetheless, he argues, the light sentences and the freedom from imprisonment these violators get have a cost in individual rights. “We go on visits to see that people are in compliance with the terms they agreed to. And if they’re not doing anything wrong, we report that, too,” he adds. “It just takes knowing the law and being able to talk to people.” |
If all this seems like your basic drug-related criminality, |
|
|
For Ray, a hard-working dad who recently adopted twin 3-year-olds to add to his original brood of two, the innovative practice was a key reason he signed up to work with Fred. “The fourth waiver search,” he says, “is our bread and butter. It’s what powers our team.” * * *Fred is back inside retrieving Mary Rivera’s computer. Already he’s turned up names and numbers showing Mary has violated her probation. And not only that. According to the team, there was meth and a meth pipe in the room, so Mary’s boyfriend, who has “several priors” and is also on probation, is under arrest, too. Mary has four kids and admits that she’s three months pregnant. She also admits, CATCH says, that she’s been trading credit-card profiles for drugs. Outside, Ken and CATCH’s Dan Adame, a police investigator for—it’s true—the US Postal Service, are going through the trash, all part of the way they knock and talk. “It’s better than dumpster diving for vice,” says Ken. In those days he had to use blacklight when looking through garbage, because it would illuminate semen. Matt has put on wrap-around shades, though the clouds still haven’t lifted. If all this seems like your basic drug-related criminality, where poor folk scratch out a living—and feed habits—doing street crime that just gets them through the day, that’s because in a way it is. For all the big numbers, much of ID theft appears to take place one addict at a time, one petty infraction after another. Fred once found a homeless person with a stolen credit card number on him. Or, it happens just “up the chain.” Mid-tier ID crime may account for the greatest portion of identity breaches, and the CATCH team has seen hundreds of cases. Here, small groups might work together and have a source of identities (“a common point of compromise”) that provides an ongoing flow. They invent countless scams and use identities in all sorts of forms: hacked credit reports, purloined store records, embezzled bank account numbers, or stolen checks, to name a few. While Mary is squeezing a few victims to score drugs, these slightly higher-level ID thieves are more methodical, though not likely to be connected to any larger cabal. And they are far more ingenious. Take the scammer the CATCH team caught a few years ago, who couldn’t resist revealing his whole scheme, because it was just so damn clever. He worked it through check-cashing businesses, which were already hip to the practice of customers passing fakes. So many people had been handing them phony checks—frequently made with a $20 package of checkbook software—that the check cashers had started phoning the number of the payer printed on the check to see that such a person or business really existed. Any ordinary fraudster could circumvent that, though. Just Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6 Next |
|||
books recent articles other projects about home
©2006 Martha Baer All Rights Reserved | |||