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The FBI on Wednesday announced that it had charged 53 defendants, the largest number ever charged in a cybercrime case, following a multinational investigation into a phishing scheme that operated in the United States and Egypt. Thirty-three of the 53 defendants named in the indictment have been arrested, the FBI said, and several others are being sought. The investigation, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," began in 2007. Authorities in Egypt have charged 47 defendants linked to the phishing operation. Phishing is a form of social engineering that attempts to convince Internet users, via e-mail or other means, to provide online credentials...

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. -- Police said a Florida Atlantic University student posed as an elderly woman to save on tuition. FAU police have filed criminal charges against former student Patricia Brandao. Police said she used the used the Social Security number of a 71-year-old woman. Brandao graduated three years ago, but school officials discovered the alleged ID theft when Brandao requested that her Social Security number be changed on transcripts sent to two medical schools.

A prosecutor looking for illegal immigrants seized thousands of confidential tax records from an income tax preparer popular with Hispanics in this northern Colorado city. The October seizures led to identity-theft and criminal-impersonation charges against more than 70 people, and prosecutors allege that as many as 1,300 suspected illegal immigrants were working using false or stolen Social Security numbers. But the American Civil Liberties Union said the documents of as many as 4,900 people were seized, many of them legal residents, and that the probe was the "equivalent of a house-by-house search of innocent homeowners in order to find a...

A corporate identity theft ring that exploited the identities of local corporations, religious institutions, hospitals and even schools to run a cheque fraud scam has been busted in New York. Investigators reckon the gang of 18 suspects made millions by impersonating workers from an estimated 350 New York-based organisations. Data purchased from corrupt bank insiders was used to lay the groundwork for the scam, which relied on cashing thousands of counterfeit payroll cheques. The fraudsters also plundered the bank accounts of individual victims, using data obtained from corrupt bank insiders to transfer funds to banks under the control of the...

ATTORNEY's ADVICE - NO CHARGE Not A Joke!! If you dislike attorneys..... You will love them for these tips. Read this and make a copy for your files in case you need to refer to it someday. Maybe we should all take some of his advice! A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company. 1. Do not sign the back of your credit cards . Instead, put ' PHOTO ID REQUIRED .' 2. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the 'For'...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court appeared poised Wednesday to rule that undocumented immigrants who use phony Social Security numbers to get work should not be considered identity thieves, even if those numbers belong to real people.

Bishop's pastoral letter hits home for parish employee By Marilyn Lanford Rogers Correspondent ROGERS -- In November, Bishop Anthony B. Taylor released his first pastoral letter to Catholics in the Diocese of Little Rock called, "I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Rights of Immigrants." In the weeks that followed, staff members at St. Vincent de Paul Church gathered to meet and discuss the pastoral letter. It was at the end of one of the meetings that staff members were asked if they had any experiences related to immigration. A slender, dark-haired young...

Computer criminals could soon be eavesdropping on what you type by analysing the electromagnetic signals produced by every key press. By analysing the signals produced by keystrokes, Swiss researchers have reproduced what a target typed. The security researchers have developed four attacks that work on a wide variety of computer keyboards. The results led the researchers to declare keyboards were "not safe to transmit sensitive information". Better attacks The attacks were dreamed up by doctoral students Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). The EPFL students tested...

A 22-year-old man who was arrested for identity fraud Tuesday is being held by federal immigration officials after he was identified as being in the United States illegally, police said Wednesday. Juan Antonio Arias Guevara, who has a local address of 2 Lions Ave., Apt. 28, was arrested without incident around noontime Tuesday at Heiland Electronics on Industrial Drive, where police said he was working under a different name and Social Security number. After a brief investigation, police said, officers discovered Guevara was in the country illegally, a charge being handled by Immigration Customs Enforcement officials.

.....a brazen family of fraudsters took advantage of sloppy subprime mortgage lenders to pull off a mindblowing scheme reeling in more than $200M - a devastating hit that contributed to the nation's financial crisis. Garri Zhigun was part of a Russian fraud ring using false documents, stolen ID's and "straw" buyers for over 1,000 subprime mortgages 2004-06. The 27-member gang worked out of a Brooklyn mortgage brokerage owned by Zhigun's mother........targets included fallen lenders Washington Mutual Bank, conned out of $842,500, Countrywide taken for $396,000.......and preyed on other banks and mortgage companies. Zhigun and accomplice Aleksander "Shorty" Lipkin bought condos...

James Woods, who played an LA prosecutor on Shark, has set a great example for dealing with identity theft. Woods told Michael Glynn at The Enquirer that he was horrified to learn that someone had charged thousands of dollars on his credit card. The crook had bought a computer and purchased two VIP tickets to the recent Dave Matthews concert at the Staples Center in LA for $3,700. The fraudulent charges were deducted from his bill, but James was determined to find the guilty party. He called the Staples center and cleverly told them he hadn't received his tickets yet...

Personal data of a million bank customers found on computer sold on eBay for ?35 By Dan Newling Last updated at 11:03 AM on 26th August 2008 Personal details of more than a million bank customers have been found on a computer sold on eBay. Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was stored on the machine's hard drive. It includes names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, bank account numbers, sort codes, credit card numbers, mothers' maiden names and even signatures. 'A thief's treasure chest': Andrew Chapman with the hard disk drive he bought on...

Not exactly criminal masterminds, but the three Ukrainian nationals busted for stealing PINs and debits, creating false cards, and pocketing the cash did have a pretty good run. And reading the legal documents on the case in the U.S. Eastern District Court offers a handful of lessons about ATM fraud and pre-paid card fraud—including the value of rotating your wardrobe. First, some of the facts in the case: three Ukrainians are charged with using fraudulent debit cards they used to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars from Citibank, WaMu and other bank ATMs in New York City. The thefts appear...

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged. In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed...

(CNN) -- Eleven people were indicted Tuesday for allegedly stealing more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers, federal authorities said. The indictments, which alleged that at least nine major U.S. retailers were hacked, were unsealed Tuesday in Boston, Massachusetts, and San Diego, California, prosecutors said. It is believed to be the largest hacking case that the Justice Department has ever tried to prosecute. Three of the defendants are from the United States; three are from Estonia; three are from Ukraine, two are from China and one is from Belarus. The remaining individual is known only by an alias...

Virginia GOP Chairman calls for criminal investigation into mounting evidence of coordinated voter fraud activities 7/28/2008 11:05:00 AM FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Richmond, Virginia (July 28, 2008) – Delegate Jeff Frederick, Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, this morning called on Governor Kaine and Attorney General McDonnell to open a thorough and rigorous investigation into what appears to be coordinated and widespread voter fraud activities occurring throughout Virginia. Frederick’s request is in response to a report last week of three individuals in Hampton, Virginia being arrested and charged with voter registration fraud, a Class 5 Felony, as well as reports...

Spitzer hooker sued for ID theftPublication date: 18 July 2008 A New Jersey woman alleged in a lawsuit that the woman accused of being a prostitute who allegedly catered to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer stole her identity. Ashley Dupre was accused of using a driver's license bearing the name of Amber Apraio in order to get herself into a Girls Gone Wild video that was widely circulated on the Internet after the Spitzer prostitution scandal broke. The Star-Ledger newspaper of Newark, N.J., said Dupre was underage at the time the video was produced several years ago. Arpaio, a resident...

Woman allegedly handed over fake documents to be screened for a job. HAMILTON — An illegal immigrant was arrested this week in the lobby of the Butler County Sheriff's Office when she allegedly passed fake identification while trying to get a background check for a job, according to sheriff's officials. Genesis Mahelet Garcia-Garcia, 25,(photo) of Sixth Avenue in Hamilton was arrested Wednesday, July 16. She is charged with two counts of forgery and one count of identity fraud. She is in the country from Mexico illegally, according to deputies. Garcia-Garcia is being held in the Butler County Jail and faces...

A state worker recently married to a member of the Mexican Mafia who is in Corcoran State Prison for a gang murder is herself under investigation for downloading more than 5,000 names, addresses and Social Security numbers belonging to Department of Consumer Affairs staff, The Bee has learned. The Department of Consumer Affairs disclosed that it suffered a data security breach last month, but at the time released few details about the incident. Officials sent a letter to employees, warning them to watch their credit for signs of identity theft, offering them free credit reports and $25,000 worth of fraud...

Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter. Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound. “It was very hard because the community...

Researchers Say Notification Laws Not Lowering ID Theft Over the past five years, 43 U.S. states have adopted data breach notification laws, but has all of this legislation actually cut down on identity theft? Not according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who have published a state-by-state analysis of data supplied by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). "There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the laws actually reduce identity theft," said Sasha Romanosky, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon who is one of the paper's authors. Romanosky's team took a state-by-state look at FTC identity theft complaints filed...

Identity theft in America goes hand and hand with illegal immigration.As everyone knows, America is experiencing an epidemic of identity theft. In the last five years alone, complaints to the Federal Trade Commission from U.S. residents who have had their identity stolen have skyrocketed 60 percent, to 258,427 in 2007—one-third of all consumer fraud complaints that the commission receives. What’s less well understood, however, is how illegal immigration is helping to fuel this rash of crime. Seeking access to jobs, credit, and driver’s licenses, many undocumented aliens are using the personal data of real Americans on forged documents. The immigrants’...

Jocelyn Kirsch, 22, and Edward K. Anderton, 25, of Everett have signed federal plea agreements that will likely send them to prison for several years, Kirsch's lawyer, Ronald Greenblatt, said Monday. U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehad announced that charges stemming from the $120,000 scheme had been moved to federal court. Since her arrest, Kirsch's friends and classmates have stepped forward to portray her as a serial liar who even masked her identity when she met the heir to the British throne at a student forum during his visit to Philadelphia last year; in a favorite myth, she told the prince she...

The first defendants from the April 16 immigration raid at the local Pilgrim's Pride chicken processing plant will be in Federal Court in Chattanooga on Tuesday. They are due to appear at 2 p.m. before Magistrate Susan Kerr Lee for hearings on whether they should continue to be detained. They include: -Jose Luis Ramirez-Vasquez Authorities say he is an alien who was previously deported and came back into the U.S. at Lukenville, Ariz. -Alfred Gabriel-Torres (also known as Jaime Hernandez) He is charged with using an invalid Social Security card for citizenship purposes -Roberto Gabriel-Ramirez Officials said he was deported...

A federal grand jury Friday indicted four Vallejo women, including a county employee, on charges of bank fraud and identity theft. Among the accused is Jennifer Miller, 43, an accounting supervisor in the Solano County Health and Human Services Department. Miller abused her position to allegedly obtain names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers of Solano County health and social services clients, including food stamp recipients, federal prosecutors said. Miller allegedly provided the stolen identities to accomplices who opened bank accounts in the names of the victims, prosecutors said.

Maybe the brilliant mind of the Free Republic members can advise on this. I run a genealogy site for the family. In here we post information obtained from the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), published by the U.S. Government. Let's say someone passes on and their spouse is receiving benefits. The SSDI publishes the SS# of the passed family member. Is it possible for the spouse to have complications arising from the theft of their loved ones ID?

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who worked in the admissions department at a prestigious Manhattan hospital has been charged with stealing and selling information on nearly 50,000 patients. Dwight McPherson, 38, a former worker at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was arrested Friday night, shortly after the hospital announced the security breach. McPherson was arraigned Saturday in federal court in Manhattan. He is charged with computer fraud, identity document fraud, transmission of stolen property and sale of stolen property. U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV ordered McPherson not to leave the New York area before his next...

Simon Bunce of Hampshire, England, not only had his credit-card number stolen online but was arrested and falsely accused of being a pedophile when that card number was used to buy child pornography. Before you think "that's a clever excuse," the story has a somewhat happy ending, as Bunce eventually was fully cleared by police. Yet that only came after he'd lost his $250,000-a-year job, his father and siblings stopped talking to him and his computer was taken away for several months, the BBC reports. Bunce had the misfortune of being caught up in Operation Ore, a massive British online...

Public anger against illegal immigrants, already entrenched in parts of Northern Virginia, is seeping into Maryland. With legislators facing unprecedented demands to take action, fears of a crackdown are spreading among illegal immigrants in a state that has been more tolerant of them.A record 20 bills targeting illegal immigrants have been introduced in the state legislature this session. Although none of the bills is expected to survive, their supporters are far more vocal and organized than in the past, and the movement has gained recent support in Maryland communities that include Mount Rainier, Gaithersburg and Taneytown."If there is any doubt...

....... Among the 36, six had criminal convictions along with their immigration violations. In a news release, ICE highlighted two of the people arrested: • Merido Mazariegos, 32, of Guatemala, convicted of fifth-degree assault in Minnesota's Nobles County. • Jose Inocente Garcia-Huix, 38, of Guatemala, convicted in Nobles County last year for forging two state identification cards under aliases.

RIP-OFF ALERT: The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology analyzed corporate America to see which companies have the highest incidence of ID theft. The No. 1 company? Bank of America. BoA is the nation's second largest bank. (If you look at the numbers based on total customer base, BoA then actually comes in second behind HSBC). AT&T occupies the second slot, followed by Sprint (No. 3), JPMorgan Chase (No. 4) and Capital One (No. 5). Think about it: 3 of the first 5 are banks, which is understandable. But why are two phone companies way up there? The reason is...

<p>CARPENTERSVILLE, Ill. - Police say identity theft is the reason the Internal Revenue Service recently warned a seven-year-old boy from the northwestern Chicago suburb of Carpentersville that he owed back taxes on $60,000.</p> <p>Officers said Friday the second-grader's identity has been in use by someone else since 2001 -- not long after his birth.</p>

St. Paul, Minn. — A public records search turned up a 23-year-old woman named Alianiss Nunez Morales in Chester, Connecticut. The records indicate her Social Security card was issued in Puerto Rico. Alianiss is not a common name. Two Spanish linguistics professors contacted for this story say they've never heard of it. They say it could be a name created by parents. Friday the prosecutor in the Cottonwood case said immigration officials went to Puerto Rico to talk to the grandmother of a person named Alianiss Nunez Morales. They showed her a mug shot of the woman now sitting in...

Although the Chino slaughterhouse case triggered national outrage and the nation's biggest meat recall, a second suspect faced only misdemeanor charges when he surrendered this week -- until his aliases and pending drug cases emerged. "His worst problem is the felony possession for sale. It's (punishable by) mandatory state prison," San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Debbie Ploghaus said Thursday of the defendant, whose true name she still doesn't know for certain. "We know him as Luis Sanchez, with a birth date of 3-8-75." Under that identity, he is one of two men charged in the Hallmark/Westland Meat Co. case...

TINLEY PARK, Ill. - A woman suspected of stealing other people's identities and duping some of the country's top universities into admitting her and giving her student loans has been arrested in a Chicago suburb, federal investigators say. Esther Elizabeth Reed, 29, was arrested on a federal warrant Saturday in Tinley Park, said Malcolm Wiley, spokesman for the Secret Service.

GE Money handles credit card operations for J. C. Penney, other retailers PLANO, Texas - Personal information on about 650,000 customers of J.C. Penney and up to 100 other retailers could be compromised after a computer tape went missing. GE Money, which handles credit card operations for Penney and many other retailers, said Thursday night that the missing information includes Social Security numbers for about 150,000 people. The information was on a backup computer tape that was discovered missing last October. It was being stored at a warehouse run by Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage company, and was never...

The frustration of proving one's age to buy things like alcohol and tobacco does not end when you reach the appropriate legal age. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have a youthful appearance are forever burdened with having to carry a state-issued ID card to every place where we might want to buy alcohol or tobacco. Over the past few years, we've been gradually subjected to another, more intrusive ID-related hassle -- that of electronic drivers license scanning. It's one thing when a government representative scans your driver's license; it's another thing entirely when a restaurant does it,...

Consumers of Internet pornography who secretly signed up for memberships on adult-oriented Web sites in the past few months may be in for a shock -- some of their personal information, including e-mail addresses, may have been compromised by a security breach. Though the breach, which potentially could affect tens of thousands of customers, reportedly did not involve the theft of credit card information, it could nonetheless have a significant impact on the lucrative Internet pornography industry, according to those who monitor the market. These observers note that online porn relies, as much as anything else, on the promise that...

More than 20 workers were arrested today at O'Hare International Airport after authorities said employees at a suburban staffing agency used fraudulent security badges to gain access to unauthorized areas of the airport. Many of the workers arrested were illegal immigrants, authorities said. The eight-month investigation led to the execution of a search warrant today at Ideal Staffing Solutions, 170 N. Pine Lane in Bensenville, and the arrests of two managers there: Mary Gurin, 36, of Carpentersville, and Norinye Benitez, 24, of Franklin Park, according to a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Each was charged with one count...

Dozens of Employees Walk Away From Electrolux NewsChannel 5 looked into whether the plant employed illegal immigrants. Sources told NewsChannel 5 more than 100 workers have been let go in the past couple of days. The employees said it was complete chaos. According to a NewsChannel 5 source, so many workers have been let go that it has been hard to do their jobs at the Electrolux plant. Second and Third shifts have been hit the hardest, and they believe the company is taking action to fix a problem that should not have happened in the first place. Diane Casey...

For Lora and Jamey Costner, a $7,854 federal income tax bill is the painful indigestion that followed two unsatisfying servings of identity theft cooked up by two former Koch Foods employees... The criminal cases involving the Newport married couple and the two illegal immigrants, who IRS records indicate worked for Koch Foods, have been resolved in the court system. The bitter aftertaste that remains is the unpalatable possibility of having their wages garnished to pay tax bills on income they never earned ... "The overall burden of it all is crushing us, please help," the Costners wrote in an appeal...

Posted: Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:54:00 +0000 Lifelock Vs TrustedID By Puripong Koomsin Each year, the cost of Identity Theft amounts to over 50 Million US Dollars and these numbers are steadily rising. Identity theft has been one of the most expensive crimes in the United States, costing both the government and individuals such a huge amount of money. Even though the crime is rising in numbers, most people still think that it may just be a result of isolated cases that have been blown out of proportion by the government and agencies that tend to gain from them. That...

The investigation of a Morton Grove man charged with 22 counts of felony identity theft started when his son reported that his father had threatened to shoot him, authorities said Tuesday. Officers were looking for weapons last week when they searched the home of Mohammad Afzal Sodagar in the 8600 block of Frontage Drive. What they found instead were hundreds of credit cards, 11 Illinois identification cards with Sodagar's photos—but bearing other names—on them, at least 36 Social Security cards, gold coins and bars and more than $60,000 in cash, said a spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

This afternoon I found out that in the last three days someone did ATM withdrawals of $500 ea, the maximum daily withdrawal, from my bank account each day. So now I'm out $1500 for about 10 days which is when the bank said they'd refund me. Somehow they had not only my card number but also my pin number and I have absolutely no idea how they could get both. I was lucky that the bank put a hold on my account due to suspicious transactions and this is how I found out. BTW, this happened in Seattle.

Angela P. Williams says she got nothing but a runaround from Equifax as she tried for more than a decade to clear up an identity mix-up that ruined her credit. Now she's hitting the credit-reporting giant where it hurts: on the bottom line. An Orlando jury awarded Williams a multimillion-dollar verdict against Equifax for years of failing to correct dramatic errors in Williams' credit report that led to her credit score being trashed.

PHILADELPHIA - They were young, rich and in love. But the jet-setters financed their fun on the credit cards of unsuspecting neighbors in their high-end apartment building and other identity-fraud victims, police said Monday. The fraud scheme paid for jaunts to Paris, London and Hawaii and a stop at a tony salon for $1,700 worth of hair extensions, police said. Drexel University student Jocelyn Kirsch, 22, and beau Edward K. Anderton, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, were charged Friday with identity theft, forgery, unlawful use of a computer and a laundry list of other counts. "They were two young people...

HILLSBORO, Ore. - A college student from Washington County could be deported after trying to renew her driver's license at a local DMV. Alejandra Trujillo, 20, went to the Tanasbourne DMV office on Friday.     When a DMV worker asked her for identification, authorities say she handed over a fake Social Security card. The DMV worker called police  and they arrested Trujillo. Lt. Mike Rouches of the Hillsboro Police department said "at that point he [the officer] had probable cause to arrest her for the crime of criminal possession of a forged instrument." Wednesday evening, supporters of Trujillo picketed outside...

In what is being called a ” catastrophic failure” two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16, receiving child benefits are missing. The discs apparently contain personal details including where relevant. The unimaginable loss means information on senior politicians, police officers and leading industrialists will be included in the missing data, which contains records on nearly half the UK’s 60.5 million population. It is reported that MPs gasped as Mr Darling revealed the scale of the loss in an emergency statement to the Commons. Two computer discs holding the personal...

More than three years after he was shot four times by Madison police during a night of bizarre behavior, a man who calls himself David Lopez Jr. will soon be released from a state mental hospital. If he were actually David Lopez Jr. he would walk out of the Mendota Mental Health Institute and return to society with a well-documented plan to keep up the treatment he 's been receiving for schizophrenia and drug and alcohol addictions. But his real identity is Carlos Toledo-Rubio, 26, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who followed a hometown friend to Madison to find work.It's...

TACOMA, Wash. - Immigration protestors marched through downtown Tacoma, stopping traffic and halting downtown bus service Friday. They're protesting federal immigration policy and the treatment of people at Tacoma's Northwest Detention Center, which holds as many as 1,000 people. Protestors vowed to shut down the city of Tacoma Friday. They fell short but did get their message across. Many wore bandanas over their faces to hide their identities. The protest had been planned for weeks. "When the ICE – Immigration Customs Enforcement - can come into our community, rip families apart, put people in jail. Whether or not they have...