ID thieves have a 50-50 chance of going to prison
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If you&#39;re a convicted identity thief, you&#39;ve got about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail time.That&#39;s one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service&#39;s data. The study&#39;s authors based their findings on an&#160;analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases.&quot;Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,&quot; the report said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time.Identity theft is concentrated in the northeastern and southern United States, the study found. And the majority of the offenders in the Secret Service cases were African-American; more than two-thirds of all offenders were male.The study also found that ID thieves tended to hit people that they did not know, rather than preying on friends and relatives. A family member or friend was the victim in 16 percent of cases. In about a third of the cases, the theft was an inside job, with the data being stolen from an employer.Identity theft is a well-studied phenomenon, but it&#39;s unusual for a survey to be based on this kind of closed-case data. &quot;This study is significant because it did not depend on self-reported or survey data,&quot; the authors wrote.The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service&#39;s Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Total losses: $13 million. &quot;In general,&quot; however, &quot;the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,&quot; the study stated.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.&#160;
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Illegal immigrants in Italy earning a few  coins by washing windscreens at traffic lights could face up to  three months in jail after Florence launched a crackdown and  other cities said they might follow suit.
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A new RFID-chipped passport card that can be read up to 30 feet away -- and on which the data's not encrypted -- has drawn censure from the Centers for Democracy and Technology, which foresees covert location tracking and an increase in ID theft on the horizon. (If you filed an objection to this program already, by the way, the government says you just don't understand it.)
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Election-year tactics like making anonymous phone calls or inventing make-believe groups to criticize the opponent now come with a higher price: the possibility of time in jail.
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Comment is free: Timothy Garton Ash: I'd go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card
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As part of the targeted legislation, the commission will consider laws for tackling ID theft later this year.
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Cyber bullies put in their place People who steal personal data in the UK will face up to two years' jail, the Government announced today.â¦
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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By Paul Wenske, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Jun. 8--If you're like lots of Americans, you're increasingly wary of identity theft.
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Eight times figure previously announced Less than two thirds of people whose profile is stored on the National DNA Database are there for having been cautioned or convicted of a criminal offence, Home Office figures have revealed.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - A Seattle man faces as many as 29 years in prison after being charged with using the LimeWire and Soulseek p-to-p (peer-to-peer) networks to commit identity theft. Gregory Kopiloff was arrested Thursday on charges of mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization, and two counts of aggravated identity theft, said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington. This is the first case that Langlie's office is aware of that involves p-to-p identity-theft charges, she said. In court filings, federal prosecutors alleged that Kopiloff began the scam around March 2005, using the p-to-p networks to search for victims who had accidentally configured their software to share sensitive documents. Hard drives were searched for "federal income tax returns, student financial aid applications, and credit reports that had been stored electronically," court filings state. Using that information, Kopiloff would fill out online credit card applications, then buy products such as iPods or computer hard drives, which he then resold for cash, typically at about 50 cents on the dollar, federal prosecutors claim. Kopiloff was allegedly able to buy more than $73,000 worth of merchandise using online credit card accounts he'd set up using the identities of at least 83 victims. It's easy for unsophisticated users to accidentally share sensitive information via p-to-p networks, said Christopher Boyd, director of malware research with FaceTime Communications. "Some P2P programs have 'share folder' options and if you accidentally hit it, bam -- it's out there without you even knowing about it," he said in an instant-message interview. But luckily there's an easy fix for the problem. Boyd recommends that p-to-p users place all of their sensitive documents on a stand-alone drive, separate from the main PC. "It's about the best way to ensure you don't accidentally share your life story with the rest of the world via P2P," he said.
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They arranged for the Foreign Office to distribute 50,000 leaflets around the streets in which he is most likely to be incarcerated.
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Justice commissioner wants a register holding fingerprints and pictures of all visitors in an effort to keep out illegal immigrants
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Federal authorities have arrested 28 individuals accused of operating public Web sites designed to help people steal, sell and forge credit cards and identification documents.
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The American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday that several states are using unreliable procedures to remove felons from voter registration rolls, possibly disenfranchising legitimate voters.
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LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Consumers are doing a better job of guarding against identity thieves, yet most still give out too many personal details, making themselves vulnerable to becoming one of the millions of victims each year, according to a survey
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A report funded by the banking industry finds U.S. ID fraud is down by a half-million victims in 2006. But a data-privacy expert says the study is dead wrong. In 27B Stroke 6.