Frank Abagnale - The Art of the Steal

Two years after she started, Heddi Ille was convicted of perjury, grand theft, and possession of stolen property, though, as so often happens, not of identity theft. Not only was she initially booked as Michelle Brown, but also when she sent letters to friends from federal prison she wrote that name on the return address, until the real Michelle Brown objected. She felt Heddi Ille had stolen quite enough from her for long enough.

THE CRIME OF THE FUTURE

I’ve saved identity theft for last, because I’m convinced it’s the crime we have the most to fear going forward. To my mind, identity theft is the crime of the future. And I think of it as the mother of all scams, because it steals everything, a person’s very being.

In so many ways, it’s the scariest and most seductive white-collar crime of all, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. It’ll probably be ten years from now before identity theft is in full swing, but we’ve already seen its striking escalation. At the beginning, someone stole your identity because he wanted to get a credit card in your name. These days, he’ll say, wait a minute, I’ll get a car loan in your name, wait a minute, I’ll get a mortgage in your name, wait a minute, I’ll assume your entire identity and get a job in your name and you’ll have to pay the taxes.

Physical attributes like DNA are unassailable and unique to you. No criminal can steal them. But we have become the various numbers that have been assigned us, and, with modern technology, that makes us increasingly vulnerable. All a thief has to do is get hold of a single set of digits—your bank account, your credit card number, or especially your Social Security number—and he can take up residence in your life. If you have great credit, he suddenly has great credit.

Anyone with a Social Security number can become a victim—even a newborn baby or someone who’s dead. Some identity thieves can pick your pocket for months and even years before they’re detected. They know just how to keep a victim’s suspicions at bay.

A Virginia couple was puzzled when a friend said he couldn’t reach them because their number was unlisted. They knew they were in the book, but figured it was a lame excuse for not inviting them to a party. When they heard the same thing from another friend, they checked with the phone company. It said the husband had asked that the number be unlisted. They shrugged that off as some mix-up, until they got a call to verify that they wanted their new Visa card mailed to a different address. They had ordered no card and had no new address. They quickly got a credit report and found that someone had already obtained another card in their name and a cash advance against it. Then they got it. The identity thief had requested that their number be unlisted so creditors couldn’t reach the couple.

Back in my criminal days, I engaged in identity theft of sorts. To be precise, I guess you could say that I engaged in profession theft. Although I never took on the identity of a living person—I never believed in crimes against the individual—I became a generic copilot and a lawyer and a doctor, among my guises. To pull this off took cleverness and perhaps a bit of a diabolical mind. You needed to be able to turn on the sweet grease and charm. I had to learn about airplanes and pilot lingo. I had to learn the law. I had to learn a suitable amount of medicine. I had to create believable IDs and acquire uniforms. I had to be able to stay cool under pressure.

Today, the identity thief can do what I did, and so much more, hiding behind numbers. No one tests his knowledge.

Identity theft is so new that it wasn’t even formally recognized as a specific federal offense until 1998, when, prompted by growing evidence of the crime, Congress passed a law, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. And though I speak of it as the crime of the future, because of its potential, it already is an enormous problem. I’ve heard estimates that half a million Americans a year are victims.

Identity theft is a chilling crime because the perpetrator is innocent until proven guilty, while the victim is guilty until he proves himself innocent. Until you’ve been caught up in this crime, you can’t imagine how hard it is to prove that innocence. It can be a nightmare of unimaginable proportions to get your credit and your identity back, if you ever fully do.

A HORSE OF MANY COLORS

The approaches taken by identity thieves vary a great deal. Most often, the thief is a total stranger, someone you’ve never seen and who has never seen you. But not always. A woman living alone in her own house took on a roommate for some added income and companionship. The roommate lived with her for nine months. She was amiable enough, and always paid her rent on time. One day she told the woman she had gotten a job offer out West, and so she would be moving. The woman was happy for her, and thought nothing of it.

A few weeks after the roommate left, the woman got a call from a bank officer. The officer said the bank had received her most recent mortgage payment, the same as always, but it hadn’t received the payment for her second mortgage. “Second mortgage?” the woman said. “What second mortgage?” It seems that the roommate, by rummaging through the woman’s utility bills and other mail, had acquired enough information to pose as her and take out a second mortgage, the money that got her out West.

One identity thief managed to accumulate more than one hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt, take out a federal home loan, buy several homes, motorcycles, and handguns, all in the victim’s name. But that still wasn’t enough for him. He would also call the victim and hector him, taunting him that he could buy all he wanted for as long as he wanted, and he would never be caught. Finally, the thief filed for bankruptcy—naturally in the victim’s name. At the time, identity theft wasn’t a federal crime, so when he was finally caught the criminal served a brief sentence for making a false statement to purchase a gun. There were no other repercussions. He made no restitution to the victim. Meanwhile, it took the victim and his wife four years and fifteen thousand dollars to restore their credit and reputation.

A Milwaukee man used a stolen Social Security number to obtain additional identity documents and set up an array of fraudulent accounts. Under his new identity, he got a job at the Wisconsin Supreme Court then stole eighty thousand dollars of computer equipment from the court. While he worked there, he also collected Social Security benefits because he claimed he was disabled and unemployed.

Con artists will steal the identities of the prominent as well as the unknown. The FBI came across two Memphis thieves that said they stole the identities of six leading executives, including the chief executive officers of Lehman Brothers, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Hilton Hotels. Two of the impersonated executives had recently died.

Before they were caught, the hucksters managed to order $730,000 worth of diamonds and Rolex watches over the Internet. They did this by having the credit card companies and banks change the billing addresses of the executives to hotels in the Memphis area, then ordering the merchandise to be shipped to the hotels. The attraction of using the names of wealthy executives was their credit was so good. When the jewelers that sold the goods contacted American Express about putting purchases of $40,000 on cards purportedly belonging to the executives, there was no hesitation. They got immediate approval.

IT’S AS EASY AS . . .

How does someone steal your identity? With the sharp erosion of privacy, the variants are endless. A thief doesn’t have to break into your home or hold you up. It all gets done on the sly.