6 Notes From the Identity Underground
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accounts and whether or not PIN numbers or the three digit security code on backs of cards were included. It was a whole secondary market that facilitated the movement of gigabytes of personal data, probably hacked from corporate systems. “Credit card numbers would go through quite a few hands,” says Christie, “reselling in ever smaller quantities, a block of 100 broken into blocks of 10, and so on.” Big rings, mid-level operators, or lone kids could purchase the raw material for their work once they’d been vetted by Shadowcrew leaders. To investigate this ring, not surprisingly, took federal agencies with a few more resources than Fred and Ray have. “Early on,” Christie recalls, “Secret Service was able to flip a high-ranking member.” After a year of tracking the players and arranging a tech-savvy sting, the feds were able to arrest 28 members of the group in a synchronized bust that involved suspects in six countries. It may be international operations running trading sites like Shadowcrew that are siphoning the most actual money off the data flow. From a great physical distance and hidden by layers of electronic anonymity, gangs in Russia, Eastern Europe, Nigeria, and other countries, can use stolen information to order massive quantities of goods that they can then resell undiscovered. Of course, many online retailers have gotten wise to the practice and make sure that some shipment of 1,000 fishing rods (they’re big in Lithuania) doesn’t make it out of the country. But rings have found a way around that problem. The system is called “mail re-shipping.” Foreign groups place employment ads on ordinary job sites like Monster.com, looking for individuals living in the US eager to work from home, earning salaries as “mail agents.” All that’s required is to receive packages and then re-mail them, often to yet another US address. Paul Luehr, now with the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, says, “The goods can go through six or seven agents. By now the paperwork is lost, and no one knows what ecommerce business they came from.” He adds, “The mail-receiving agent doesn’t even know he’s being scammed.” One individual in the San Francisco area, who worked such a job for six months, received over 750 packages in the mail, worth more than $1 million. Sometimes the goods never reach the ring’s native country but land in the London, for instance, where an electronics dealer who doesn’t necessarily realize he’s a fence sells them straight to consumers. He takes a cut of the proceeds and sends the rest to his mystery supplier in Lithuania. Veteran postal inspector Barry Mew spent five years trying to chase down some of these overseas fraud operators. Repeatedly, he’d track a case to the crucial borders—he made it as far as Finland on one case—only to be stone-walled by foreign law enforcement. It took him three years to get four people arrested in Pakistan. Mew is left with loads of rare expertise about these schemes. “In a nutshell,” he says, “you take a stolen credit card, and you do everything with it: Post the job, open up an Internet service account, set up a Web site that says you’re a reshipping company in Europe. You can order shipping labels now with stolen credit cards.” Frequently, the groups pay their mail agents with transfers from the bank accounts of theft victims. Given all these styles of ID crime, from high-level Russian gangs moving boatloads of goods to low-level addicts fishing receipts out of waste baskets, where should law enforcers focus their attention? “We just don’t know,” says Erin Kenneally, who has a Master’s in forensic science and a law degree. She is currently surveying victims for more information about their specific ordeals and urging law enforcement to better record their findings—because, as yet, no central agency in the US has done the research that could help characterize the crime and define priorities. According to Kenneally, until we can measure factors like the geographical relationship between perpetrator and victim or the percentage of ID theft instigated via property crime like car break-ins, divvying up prevention resources will be guesswork. Fred isn’t waiting for the research. His attitude: Go after the miscreants you can apprehend quickly and efficiently, and get them off the street. Keith Burt, his CATCH boss, is behind him. Burt figures there’s plenty of work to do right in front of them, and he makes the point with a telling metaphor. “For every dope dealer with the tinted windows who fits the Hollywood image,” he says, “there are a hundred thousand little guys.” |
Sometimes the goods land in London, say, where an electronics |
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* * *“I don’t want to sound like we’re storm troopers,” Fred says, “but sometimes you have to dominate the situation.” He’s packing up his guns and his bullet-proof vest and loading the suspect’s Dell computer into his unmarked green pick-up. This time, there hasn’t been much dominating needed. Mary and her guy look as if they’re coming down from a high. She’s a pretty, Hershey-colored 27-year-old, with a mess of wavy black hair and a scowl on her face that’s heart-wrenching. CATCH’s Randy Lawrence from the county D.A.’s office guides her, with her hands cuffed behind her back, to an unmarked station wagon. Ray, gentle and serious, walks the young man to an unmarked van. In the driveway, with Mary’s mother, Matt is trying to make human contact. “Your daughter has to care about herself,” he says. “She’s making the same mistake over and over.” In the bushes is a lawn ornament displaying a dolphin and the words “Dive into Life.” Several days later, Mary is still in custody. In-house forensic analysts will study the computer to see if any other individuals have used it to commit crimes. The same deputy D.A. who handled her case the first time, back when Ray delivered her Nordstrom’s jeans, is working her case again. Meanwhile, the CATCH team is still widening the net. So far, no one has elucidated the Staybridge Suites connection—how Paul Tagalog and Mary both got those documents and whether a hotel insider was complicit. But some of the mail showing up at Mary’s house is addressed to another young woman, who turns out to be on probation for cocaine possession. Her record says she’s been involved in ID theft, too. Fred and the team are planning another knock-and-talk. • • • Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
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