Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Identity thieves and the women who love them

June 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Identity thieves and the women who love them

TAGS: Security

I'm at the Gartner IT Security Summit where Richard Goldberg, chief of the Financial Institution Fraud and Identity Theft section of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is giving a pretty interesting presentation on identity theft and identity theft rings. While we all like to think that the guys behind identity theft scams are shadowy hacking groups in Russia and China, the truth is that the average identity theft scam reads a lot more like an edition of "Ms. Lonely Hearts" than "The French Connection."

Women, it seems, are often the "trusted insiders" who provide identity information for ID theft ringmasters, who Goldberg calls "Concierges." The women are approached, often at bars, by identity thieves looking for easy access to personal data. "A guy comes up to you in a bar and asks where you work. If you say you flip burgers at McDonalds, he moves on. If you say you work at a Doctor's office, he'll offer to buy you a drink. Tell him you work at an insurance company, and he'll offer to buy you a lot more than that."

The women fall for the guy's charm -- or the free drinks -- and later for some hard luck story that gets her pinching customer or patient data for use in ID theft scams.

"There's a male female dynamic. The female is the insider, and the male is the scumbag," Goldberg said.

There are other people in the loop too -- a "Manufacturer" who produces fake IDs for the concierge and then, on the outside, legions of drug addicts who take the fake ids and risk getting caught using them to buy goods at retail outlets, which are then fenced by the folks on the inside. The best of these ID theft rings are sophisticated -- moving around from county to county and avoiding big hits to stay off the radar of local police, he said.

This all sounds like some bad stereotype from the 1950s -- "weak" and "vulnerable" women falling victim to wily, predatory men. This at a conference that will feature a panel featuring three senior female executives -- all chief privacy officers at leading corporations.

Goldberg has plenty of examples of good girls gone bad, and coaxed into helping with identity theft. But they're just anecdotal, and there are plenty of other examples that suggest that identity theft is a gender neutral activity.

But the large strokes in his portrait ring true.

Just last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington announced the sentencing of Thang Van Nguyen, of Garden Grove, California, to 54 months in prison for stealing $1.6 million in bank fraud using the stolen identities and bank account numbers of 90 different individuals, many of whom were Starbucks employees.

According to court records, the scam was fueled by information stolen by a Starbucks HR employee -- the trusted insider (yeah yeah yeah -- it was a woman.)Nguyen was a “driver” for the fraud group, ferrying others using false ID to banks around the country so they could deposit the phoney checks into accounts, then immediately withdraw the funds. Nguyen took a cut for himself and "concierge" Lam T. Pham. He'll be sentenced in July, the Starbucks employee on June 30.

Posted by Paul Roberts on June 5, 2006 07:47 AM

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