Kimberly Lawlor

News article_Identity theft

                I got my article from the New York Times, written by James Warren, this article was published February 5^th. This article basically talks about how they think people really need to start carrying cash because it is way safer now a day’s then using a credit card. This article was about a man who was sentenced to twelve years in prison for fencing high end stolen goods. It was a group of people; the main guy was sentenced to 40 months, and the other 21 months. They stole credit card numbers, lots of them. These men stole credit card numbers right from big retailers such as Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, and mostly they would order merchandise from these cards and keep it for themselves. They would steal clientele books from very high end stores which include things such as the person’s name, address; clothing they liked, their birthday, and their social security number were all in this book. They would get this information and order thousands and thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. They would put different destinations to have them to be delivered to, they were very sneaky. But apparently not sneaky enough because they got caught. They used all sorts of delivery methods they would sometimes pick it up from the store itself, or they would steal it right off the porch of the delivery address which was the victims own household, and claim that they were the recipient. After that they would sell the stuff or go to the store and return it for cash. This just shows that technology is not a safe thing anymore and that people need to keep less credit cards and more cash. They also need to not as frequently order things online because hackers can easily get their information. Fraud is becoming a huge deal and people need to keep their identity and information as safe as possible! This reminded me of last class where we listened to the man on the phone with the women who knew all his information just from a system data base, and how we talked about hackers and how it is becoming a huge threat to the united states.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/identity_fraud/index.html