Word: theft
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Here's the scary thing about the identity-theft ring that the feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40,000 victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their...
Even scarier is that this, the largest identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700,000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. It's one of crime's biggest growth markets. A name, address and Social Security number--which can often be found on the Web--is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure...
...think you're a victim of identity theft, you can ask for fraud alerts to be put on file at each of the three credit-report companies. You can also download a theft-report form at www.consumer.gov/idtheft which, along with a local police report, should help when irate creditors come knocking. Just don't expect justice. That audacious help-desk worker was one of the fewer than 2% of identity thieves who are ever caught...
...Cahill's most loyal lieutenants. In a June 2001 raid, his gang took two paintings: Bellotto's View of Florence and Gainsborough's Madame Baccelli. It was the third time these paintings had been lifted. The gardaí believe the Viper, who is still at large, masterminded the theft for insurance purposes - to trade the art for his freedom. Former officers say such negotiations are not uncommon. "Deals are done all the time, let's be honest about it," says O'Carroll. "The Beit paintings are stolen for bargaining chips. [The thieves] know that they can't offload them...
...number of unlucky people victim-ized in the largest case of "identity theft" in U.S. his-tory, the government an-nounced, after a suspect was charged with the mas-sive fraud last week...