We have seen our share of weird cases involving Craigslist, but nothing like these: Continue reading ‘Craigslist Crooks’
Tag Archive for 'Fraud'
Infamous hacker Kevin Poulson paid the defaulted Yellow Page accounts of escort services to get their defunct telephone numbers reactivated. He collected the profits and when the police became interested, only the original advertiser was on record with the telephone company. I once saw this done in a home renovation scam.
In Cynthia Hetherington’s excellent book, Business Background Investigations: Tools and Techniques for Solution Driven Due Diligence, she tells of a group of crooks who moved into an office recently vacated by an insurance company. They took-up the old phone number and began selling insurance.
When new policy holders complained about bad service to the insurance company’s head office, the scam was revealed, but the crooks had moved on.
It’s not just people who have their identity stolen.
False blind man caught out during car check: report - Yahoo! News: “ROME (AFP) - A 70 year-old Italian man who had been pretending to be blind for 40 years to get an invalid’s pension was arrested as he drove his car, Sky TG24 television said Thursday.
The ‘particularly nervous’ man was stopped during a routine road check in the northern city of Spezia and could not provide a driving licence, city police chief Massimo Giaramita said.
‘Then we checked his medical record and were amazed to find that he was registered as 100 percent blind,’ Giaramita said.0
He had been claiming an invalidity pension and other benefits from his former employers for 40 years, the report said.”
An article by John Polyzogopoulos, a partner of Blaney McMurty LLP, in the January 2008 edition of the Commercial Litigation Update explains a Norwich order can help victims of fraud determine what happened to the money.
The recent decision of Justice James Spence in Isofoton S.A. v. The Toronto-Dominion Bank should be of interest to anyone who suspects they may have been the victim of fraud. In that case, Justice Spence granted a Norwich order to obtain the banking records of a party suspected of defrauding the applicant of over $3 million. The unique nature of the disclosure order was that it was directed not to the alleged fraudster, but to the fraudster’s bank. The disclosure order was made to assist the applicant in investigating the fraud and determining what happened to its funds.
The article also illustrates the need for due diligence research prior to entering into an agreement with a previously unknown supplier. Once the victim realised that the supplier was not acting in good faith, they hired a PI who determined that the the supplier was a company without the assets necessary to deliver the contracted goods.
We have all heard of the faked-death scams to defraud insurance companies, escape prosecution, or to start over. The latter always happens in the aftermath of mass-casualty events like train wrecks, fires, and terrorist attacks. But what about the reverse — pretending to be somebody who has died?
This is not uncommon simply because it is so difficult to uncover the truth of someone’s identity and it has been so throughout my thirty years of Canadian experience.
In Canada, registering deaths is a provincial responsibility. The national vital statistics death registration system run by Statistics Canada does not include the deceased’s name or date of birth. There are no public search facilities for determining if the identity that you are presented with is that of a dead person.
In the U.S.A., the Social Security Administration Death Master file includes 98% of deaths of persons who participated in the Social Security program. This is may be searched at several internet sites.
In the UK, Smee & Ford Limited created a database called Mortascreen, which was used to screen direct mail lists for deceased people. This data was augmented and is now used as the foundation for Halo, a database that covers 85% of the deaths occurring annually in the UK. It is updated monthly and includes historical data to make it useful for verifying a person’s identity.
According to the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service, CIFAS, since 2001, impersonation of the dead is Britain’s fastest growing identity theft crime. The latest research suggests the problem has been under-stated by 3.5 times and revised statistics now indicate that 70,000 families experienced the pain of discovering their loved one had been impersonated after their death, to open accounts such as credit cards and loans.
According to the Home Office figures on crime in England and Wales in Jan 2003, “Between April 2000 and March 2001, the passport agency detected 1,484 fraudulent applications of which 301 used the identities of the deceased.”
I suspect that Canada may have a problem with this type of identity theft, but there is no way of knowing the extent of the the problem.
We wrote about this here in Ten Private Investigators Indicted on 7 Dec 07.
Wired Magazine has posted the Indictment of the accused who allegedly employed false pretenses to gain personal information. A related Wired article compares this type of pretexting to the HP mess.
The accused are from Washington, California, Oregon, Texas and New York:
Emilio Torrella, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Brandy Torella, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Steve Berwick, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Victoria Tade, C.I., Inc., California
Megan Ososke, P.I. and Information Services, Oregon
Robert Grieve, Robert Greive International, Texas
Ziad Sakhleh, Robert Greive International, Texas
Darci Templeton, sole proprietor, Texas
Patrick Bombino, AAA Allstate Investigations, New York
Esau Pinto, AAA Allstate Investigations, New York
The Indictment alleges that BNT supplied the improperly obtained personal information to the PI’s for a fee. BNT was not identified as a private investigation firm in the Indictment, but was identified as a company that sold its pretexting services to PI firms. Some of the PI firms even advertised for sale to other PI’s what they were obtaining from BNT.
Accusations #17 and #21 allege that BNT obtained medical information by pretext, much in the same way as was revealed by he Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Confidentiality of Health Records in Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Justice Horace Krever.
Ten private investigators were indicted on December 5, 2007,in Seattle, WA, by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The alleged defendants collected information via pretext from the I.R.S., Social Security Administration, various State Unemployment Insurance Departments, private financial institutions, banks, pharmacies and hospitals. The alleged defendants fraudulently posed as the individuals about who information was sought.
If this is true, they broke Rule #1.
Washington State requires a Private Investigator to be licensed. However, it seems that BNT Investigations and the three named individuals in Washington state might not have state-issued Private Investigator’s licences. I don’t know the licence status of the others.
This type of behaviour is not new. In Canada, this issue was, in part, dealt with during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Confidentiality of Health Records in Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Justice Horace Krever.
The Royal Commission heard from over 500 witnesses, including private investigation firms, insurance companies, hospitals, and others. During 1976 and 1977, the Royal Commission found evidence of hundreds of successful efforts to acquire health information from Ontario hospitals and doctors under pretext.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada admitted to the Royal Commission that its members had gathered medical information through “various sources” without the authorization of the patients.
Several investigation companies went out of business due to the Royal Commission exposing their activities.
Where there are clients willing to pay for this improper and unprofessional behaviour, there will be providers of such services.
A recent study by the Center for Identity Management and Information Protection suggests that less than one fifth of criminals get their data from the internet. In most cases it they get their data by re-routing mail, dumpster diving and intercepting mail.
The study is available at the Center for Identity management and Information Protection (CIMIP) but unfortunately they what identifying personal information before you access the study.
