The Sweetest Con of All : Part 2

Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan
by Frank W. Abagnale

(Page 2 of 3)

Then, the rewards are enormous. Identity theft will afford you access not only to someone's wallet and bank account but to his very life and character, his entire ability to borrow and spend. Are you worried about the law? No need. Technology has made identity theft easy to execute behind the shadowy cloak of a computer keyboard. You don't even have to be in the same city, or country, as your victim. You can steal someone's identity without being able to speak his language or pronounce her name.

Moreover, law enforcement cares less about identity theft than it does about double - parked cars and public loiterers. Your chances of getting caught are minuscule. But even if you do get caught, you are unlikely to spend a single night in jail. Swiping a kid's bike might have graver consequences.

When I ran all these things through my mind, they unnerved me to no end. And my long - dormant criminal instincts stirred a little and made me think, Why didn't they invent this con back when I could have used it?

When I was passing phony checks in other people's names more than thirty years ago, for example, it took me three months and a million - dollar Heidelberg printing press to create and cash a realistic - looking product. Today criminals do it in an instant on a $500 computer, with no witnesses to pick them out in a lineup, because they're doing it from an armchair in China or Russia, a continent away. And checks are simply one piece of an identity thief's arsenal.

In recent years identity theft has become the very monster I feared it would become. It's a crime so versatile that the list of potential targets is endless. Who's at risk? Anyone who has a credit card or a bank account, or who pays a bill. Anyone who has a mortgage, a car loan, or a debit card. Anyone who has a driver's license, a Social Security number, or a job. Anyone who has phone service or health insurance. Anyone who goes on the Internet.

Even somebody who's always watching his back, like me. People of all ages, all races, all incomes, and both sexes. A thirty - five - year - old New York busboy had the hubris to choose names off the Forbes 400 list, including Ross Perot, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Bloomberg, and Ted Turner, gleaned additional information on them from the Internet, and became them. Robert De Niro's identity was assumed by his movie double. Tiger Woods was victimized by a California man who rented a moving truck and a storage locker in his name. In Chandler, Arizona, the identity of the retired police chief was taken over by a woman who loaded up at Wal - Mart and Sam's Club stores. Twin brothers were kicked off the popular American Idol show after police said they had bought a car using the stolen identities of two unwitting fans.

In other words, anyone who's alive is a potential victim. Actually, I stand corrected - even the dead can become targets of this insidious crime. You can have lived your life, then be resting eternally six feet under - and you're still not protected from the long reach of identity thieves. Scam artists have no compunction. After all, the dead rarely complain.

These days you can't go to a party or have lunch with three or four people without someone in that group mentioning that he got a phony e - mail, or that his credit card was compromised - that somehow someone snatched his identity. Identity theft is the fastest - growing criminal activity in the country (and it's doing awfully well abroad). And it could be coming soon to a bank account near you.

Every Four Seconds

Accurate statistics on identity theft are tricky to come by, because it remains an underdocumented crime. Many people and businesses don't report incidents to the police, and a startling number of people don't even know their identities have been stolen. The reported numbers, though, are shocking.

At the time when I wrote my last book, The Art of the Steal, in 2001, there were about 750,000 documented victims of identity theft, and losses to banks and credit card companies amounted to $5 billion. That's not chicken feed, but in 2003 the Federal Trade Commission released the most exhaustive government study to date of identity theft, estimating that there had been 27.3 million victims in the prior five years. In 2004 alone, around 10 million consumers suffered from some variation of identity theft, and losses exceeded $54 billion. In 2005 the FTC was swamped with five thousand calls a week relating to the problem, more than they got on any other issue and triple what they had received just five years before.

When a major insurance company recently polled a sizable sampling of its policyholders on their biggest fears, the number - one response was their fear of losing all their assets through bad stock market and other investments. Number two was their fear of identity theft. Throughout the country people go out of their way to put multiple locks on their doors and install costly silent alarm systems. Well, in a given year, about 2.6 percent of Americans have their homes burglarized, but about 4.3 percent of them have their identities stolen. In 2005 it's believed that an identity was stolen every four seconds.

The crime has universal appeal to criminals, and it's happening all over the world. A recent survey conducted in New Zealand by Baycorp Advantage found that one in ten of the 450 Kiwis questioned said that they had been the victim of identity theft.

Copyright © 2007 by Frank W. Abagnale

About the Author

Frank W. Abagnale is the author of the bestselling memoir Catch Me If You Can and The Art of the Steal. He works closely with the FBI and corporations around the world as an expert on counterfeiting and document security. He lives in the Midwest.