- Terrorism and Identity Theft
- Who Are Identity Thieves?
- What Do Identity Thieves Do?
- College Students and Identity Theft
- Malware and Macs
- Dumpster Diving
- You Are Only As Safe As the Places That Have Your Information
- They Should Know Better
- Hackers
- Identity Theft Risk in Old Gaming Consoles
- The Drug Connection
- Phishing
- Federal Express Phishing Scam
- Newegg Phishing Scam
- Former Good Advice
- More Good Advice to Avoid Becoming a Victim of Phishing
- The Dangers of Aquaman
- Iron Man 3
- Nude Photos of Carla Bruni
- Debit Card Phishing Scam
- Another Debit Card Phishing Scam
- Phishing with a Large Net
- Phishing Around the World
- Spearphishing
- How Do You Know That You Have Become a Victim of Phishing?
- Reloading
- Identity Theft Through Internet Phone Calls
- What Do Kim Kardashian and Michelle Obama Have in Common?
- USB Sticks and Identity Theft
- Internet of Things
- What You Can Do to Prevent Identity Theft
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Who Are Identity Thieves?
Identity theft is an equal-opportunity crime. Identity theft is done by organized crime both in the United States and in foreign countries around the world, particularly Eastern Europe. Much of the rash of recent hackings of companies and government agencies in order to steal personal information to be used for identity theft purposes can be traced back to Russia. A 17-year-old Russian hacker, Sergey Taraspov, is thought to have written the computer program used to attack Target late in 2013. Taraspov is alleged to have sold the program on the black market for $2,000.
Although the name of Bulgarian Aleksi Kolarov is probably not familiar to you, it probably should be. In 2014 he was convicted of identity theft in federal court in New Jersey. For years, Kolarov was one of the leaders and operators of the website Shadowcrew.com, a black market website where stolen credit cards, debit cards, and bank account information were sold to the approximately 4,000 members of the criminal website. It has been estimated that Shadowcrew was responsible for the theft of 1.5 million credit cards, debit cards, and bank account numbers, resulting in fraud losses totaling millions of dollars to the banks issuing the cards.
According to the FBI, a Russian organized crime gang responsible for the data breach at Neiman Marcus in 2013 was also responsible for the theft of more than 160 million credit cards from numerous other retailers over the previous seven years.
Identity theft, however, is not solely the province of organized crime. It is done by small-time hoodlums, street gangs, your fellow workers, and even members of your own family.