Identity Theft--It's My Turn--Again

[RainyDay]

The short story is that someone has my social, etc. they tried to buy an item and I found out when I was contacted for confirmation. The order was placed online. The company won't give me the e-mail address without a police report (which will take an unknown time to process). Are there cyber detectives who can ferret out the actual identity of someone who is using a bogus e-mail address (a la Spam Cop?)

Anybody have this happen to them?

[moneyp]

Originally posted by RainyDay
The short story is that someone has my social, etc. they tried to buy an item and I found out when I was contacted for confirmation. The order was placed online. The company won't give me the e-mail address without a police report (which will take an unknown time to process). Are there cyber detectives who can ferret out the actual identity of someone who is using a bogus e-mail address (a la Spam Cop?)

http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp

[RainyDay]

Thanks.l

[tippy]

Someone ordered from a catalog clothing company (Cheyenne Western Wear or something like that) with my name and credit card number once and the confounding thing was that it was illegal for the credit card or clothing company to give me the shipping address for the order...how stupid is that?

They protect the privacy of the person who has stolen yours! But why?

Good luck, Rainy.

[Monte Smith]

Hmm. "Identity theft." That reminds me of the time 25 of your Earth years ago that I landed on this planet and took control of the host-body Monte Smith.

[Dr Dave]

I've not had "identity theft" but I did use a Visa card in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico some years back and came home to find $650 worth of charges to a Guadalajara address. Must have been the day the waiter took 10 minutes to return my card...c'est la vie digital.

Monte: Was it a transmitter embedded in the brain stem or did you wake up one morning and find an empty pod next to your bed?

[Pete C]

Somebody used my credit card (while it was *safely* in my pocket) to spend 6 grand at Bloomingdales. I had no problem about the charge, and canceled the card, but the worst part was that I got all this junk mail from Bloomies because I was a "preferred customer," and it took me quite a while to get off their list.

[RainyDay]

Originally posted by tippy
They protect the privacy of the person who has stolen yours! But why?

Good luck, Rainy.

Thanks. I sort of understand why they won't tell details about who may have done it. If I knew who was doing it, I would want to exact some form of revenge. Probably legal revenge. That they have my social security number is going to make it very messy for me. It happened once before but I caught it within a couple of days. I don't think they had my social security number then either.

[jesus marion joseph]

This kind of stuff seems to happen quite a lot these days.



The alien-in-your-body thing, I mean.

[Chris A]

I guess many of you have experienced an escalation of unwanted, highly suspicious e-mail lately. There is the regular dose of penis-enlargement and Viagra-type pitches, but more troublesome is that mail where they pretend to be UPS, PAT PAL, etc. and try to solicit your personal info. My ISP (at least I think that's the sender) almost daily notifies me of some "undeliverable" mail that I never sent.--CA

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/article/header/nytlogoleft_article.gif
March 24, 2004

Online Swindlers, Called 'Phishers,' Lure Unwary

By SAUL HANSELL

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/24/business/24PHIS.jpg
Lisa Cook of Brookline, N.H., was
taken in, but notified card issuers
quickly and avoided losses.

Last year, EarthLink, the big Internet access provider, went hunting for phishers.

It started a campaign to track down people who were sending e-mail messages that pretended to be from EarthLink but were actually fraudulent attempts to steal customers' passwords, credit card numbers and other information. What it found was that of the dozen or so people it could clearly identify as engaged in the practice known as phishing, more than half were under 18.

In its latest effort, EarthLink discovered a lot of phishing e-mail messages coming from computers in Russia, other East European countries and Asia. The e-mail messages, and the Web sites they directed people to, were becoming much more technically sophisticated.

"A year ago, there were some phishers out there, and it was mostly teenagers and other people fooling around," said Les Seagraves, EarthLink's chief privacy officer. "Now I think we are moving to more criminal enterprise."

Phishing attacks are growing rapidly, impersonating Internet service providers, online merchants and banks. Government officials and private investigators say all signs point to gangs of organized criminals — most likely in Eastern Europe — as being behind many of the latest efforts.

"Like any other black market, there is a stratification in phishing," said Kevin E. Leininger, president of ICG of Princeton, N.J., an investigative firm that has been hired by banks to find those behind the attacks. "There are people who are rank amateurs. And there are identity-theft rings."

So far, the offenders have largely evaded the searches to find them. One reason is that they often use computer worms, spread from machine to machine, to send the fraudulent e-mail — a technique that makes it almost impossible to trace the source.

Like EarthLink's investigators, government authorities have managed to track down a few individuals operating less sophisticated ruses. The F.B.I. traced one crop of mass e-mail messages pretending to be from the "AOL Billing Center" to Helen Carr, 55, who ran the scheme from her home in Akron, Ohio. (Ms. Carr pleaded guilty and was sentenced in January to 46 months in prison.)

But federal investigators write off people like Ms. Carr as small-time operators. "The kids in school and the old lady in her basement make great copy," said Bruce A. Townsend, deputy assistant director in the office of investigations at the Secret Service, which investigates cases of credit card fraud. "But this has transformed into something done by organized criminal groups."

In February, 282 cases of phishing e-mail messages were reported to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a coalition of technology companies, financial institutions and law enforcement agencies. That was up from 176 attacks in January and 116 in December. Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September.

"Identity theft is the single greatest type of consumer fraud," said Christopher A. Wray, an assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department, "and phishing is the identity theft du jour."

At this point, there are few sure ways for an Internet user to tell if an e-mail message is legitimate. So experts advise people to be extremely wary of providing any confidential information in response to e-mail.

"The crooks are getting slicker, and the bogus Web sites and e-mails are dangerously legitimate looking," Mr. Wray said.

No one knows how much money has been stolen through phishing schemes. Banks say it still seems relatively small compared with other forms of fraud and theft, like using stolen credit or debit cards.

One reason it is not easy to figure out how much money has been lost is because many victims do not realize it when they have been fleeced. Even those who find an unauthorized charge on their credit card bills and bring this to the attention of the issuers do not necessarily know that the charge was caused by their response to a false e-mail message.

"People think they are giving their credit card numbers to AOL because there is a problem in their account," said Eric A. Wenger, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, which has brought civil actions against several phishers. "If they find out four weeks later there are unauthorized charges on the credit card, it never occurs to them to connect the two events."

Lisa Cook, a sales representative with Kraft Foods who lives in Brookline, N.H., was one of the lucky ones who discovered that she had been subject to phishing before she was significantly harmed. Ms. Cook responded one morning, before her first cup of coffee, to a message in her e-mail in-box seemingly from PayPal, the electronic payment service of eBay. It said she needed to update her account, so she dutifully provided her credit card and Social Security numbers, mother's maiden name and other identifying information.

Luckily, she spotted a warning later the same day about Internet scams. Ms. Cook placed a panicked call to PayPal, which confirmed her fear that she had been phished.

She was able to cancel all her credit cards and change passwords before she lost any money. But the experience haunts her.

"It will always be in the back of my mind," she said. "I worry that some day down the road, someone will take out a mortgage using my information."

Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish — or phish — for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else's expense. After AOL switched to a flat monthly rate, the same phishing methods were used to steal credit card information.

These days, the same factors are driving all sorts of spam in much greater amounts.

"It doesn't cost any money to go out and copy someone else's Web page to make it look real," said John Curran, a supervisory agent for the F.B.I. "And it doesn't cost any money to spam the e-mail out to one million people."

The phisher's goal is to persuade a recipient that he has received a legitimate message, which must be replied to immediately.

As for motivation, phishers sometimes appeal to greed by sending an e-mail message that promises the recipient a prize, asking for a credit card number only to bill for shipping costs. More often, they rely on fear.

"The initial hook is something alarming," Mr. Curran said. "They tell you they will shut down your account or you have been charged for child pornography. Once they get you in a state where you are agitated or excited, they can elicit an emotional response."

The open technology used in both e-mail and Web browsing make it easy to create convincing fakes and difficult for recipients to verify who is really behind them. Even people with only modest technical skills can take graphic elements from a legitimate Web site and make a credible copy. (Many phishing attempts last year were riddled with typographical errors and awkward language, but now it appears that most phishers have brushed up on their English or hired proofreaders.)

Phishers often create Internet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones. Some have used domains that included "yahoo-billing.com" and "eBay-secure.com." How is the typical user to know those are not real, but "billing.yahoo.com" is?

In response, Microsoft has modified Internet Explorer, the most popular Web browser, to make it harder to fool users and it has more changes planned for the next browser update planned for release this summer.

A few Internet companies are going further. EBay and EarthLink have both developed toolbars that can be added to Internet Explorer to warn users if they are looking at known fraudulent sites.

But Howard Schmidt, a vice president for security at eBay, acknowledged that these approaches — and eBay's frequent warnings to its customers and PayPal's — have their limits.

"Technology can solve 60 percent of the problem," he said. "Education and awareness can solve 20 percent, and no matter how good the industry is, there will be people who fall victims so 20 percent will have to be handled by law enforcement."

But even the small-time phishers who have been caught show how simple it is to use easily accessible high-technology tools to fool people. In February, Alec Scott Papierniak, 20, a college student in Mankato, Minn., pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He had sent people e-mail messages with a small program attached that purported to be a "security update" from PayPal. The program monitored the user's activity and reported their PayPal user names and passwords back to Mr. Papierniak.

Prosecutors say that at least 150 people installed the software, enabling Mr. Papierniak to steal $35,000.

While most of those prosecuted so far for phishing have been in the United States, eBay, working with the Secret Service, has investigated a series of scams originating in Romania. More than 100 people have been arrested by Romanian authorities. One of them, Dan Marius Stefan, convicted of stealing nearly $500,000 through phishing, is now serving 30 months in a Romanian prison.

Mr. Stefan sent e-mail messages that appeared to come from eBay to people who were unsuccessful auction bidders, advising them of similar merchandise for sale at even better prices. To purchase the goods, the message recipients were told to provide bank account numbers and passwords and then to wire money to an escrow site — a fraudulent one — Mr. Stefan had set up.

The financial losses of most phishing victims, particularly those subject to credit card fraud, often end up being absorbed by banks and their insurance companies.

But the costs are real."We get 20,000 phone calls every time one of those goes out, and it costs us 100 grand," said Garry Betty, EarthLink's chief executive. "I got so mad one month when we had eight attacks," he said, explaining that he is pressing his legal department to find someone important to make an example of.

"We haven't found one yet," Mr. Betty added, "but before 2004 is over, I'm going to get one."

[clinthopson]

I understand that AOL and MSN Outlook users are more vulnerable to this kind of thing. I use neither.

I check my credit card balance regularly on the net just to be sure that I'm not a target.

Of course, the credit card company should reverse any false charges, which they have done for me in the past.

But let's face it, none of us are all that safe against this kind of thing.

[Chris A]

So far, today, I have had to delete 5 penis offers, 9 Viagra offers, a scam letter from Africa, and 7 "undeliverable" messages that I purportedly sent!

[Jazzzoline]

Originally posted by Chris A
So far, today, I have had to delete 5 penis offers, 9 Viagra offers, a scam letter from Africa, and 7 "undeliverable" messages that I purportedly sent!

But you kept the escorts, schoolgirls going wild, huge boobs and watch me pee on his face emails ...

[Chris A]

I forwarded them to Monte, as per his request. :)

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by Chris A
I forwarded them to Monte, as per his request. :)

Once again, Earthling, my name springs unbidden to your finger tips.

[frankenmeister7]

Well since my cut and paste don't work, all i have to say is monte and Dr. Dave you both should be committed. Lmaofyb

My husband "once" had a credit calling calling and he got it stolen by a scam going some 10 years ago. next week after sammy got home from Germany we got a phone bill for over
2 thousand dollars.

i know that i call everyone in the universe but sammy didn't take this lying down. he called the phone and called all services.

they did catch the perps, but with my prodding did i get the man to hook up the phone on the wall.

he threw all of our phone the the garbage except one, his cell phone. He was so mad that he was rattling in that charlie chan dialogue for weeks.

[frankenmeister7]

one should use the spell check more often.

phone card got cancelled and we have a cell phone left.

that should about do it. keep it short and banal.

franki/bananas

[Dr Dave]

Originally posted by Jazzzoline
But you kept the escorts, schoolgirls going wild, huge boobs and watch me pee on his face emails ...

You are a very naughty person, and require discipline.

[Jazzzoline]

Originally posted by Dr Dave
You are a very naughty person, and require discipline.

I'm not sure how to take this.. please help me see through it before I loose control of my fingers on the keyboard....

[Jazzzoline]

I'm waiting for your explainations Dr Dave

[Jazzzoline]

Well, since you won't reply I'll take this post for what it says:

Originally posted by Dr Dave
You are a very naughty person, and require discipline.



1- the reply about schoolgirls etc was meant to Chris who obviously caught the spirit of my post.

2- if you don't like what I post, there is a "ignore feature" you can use. Try it and then you can forget me forever.

3- For about requiring discipline, who are you to tell me what I require? and if I ever require anything, it would never be from you ! (find yourself some children to raise and leave me alone, I don't need a father or whatever you think you are !)

4- For as being naughty, well you'll never have the chance to find out.

*rolling my eyes*

[moneyp]

Calm down, Jazzy. Dave's post was tongue-in-cheek.

[Jazzzoline]

Well, I asked for explanations before I let loose on my keyboard, If it was tongue in cheek, he just could say it.
It's not the first time he "insult" me.

I strongly suggest the ignore button.

[Ron Thorne]

Jazzzoline, I'm confident (as was Moné) that Dr. Dave meant nothing negative with his post #18. I'm confident that we have a language/communication problem here, not an insult directed at you. Typically, tongue-in-cheek remarks shouldn't and don't (usually) require an explanation. Computer "conversations" are never as clear as face-to-face encounters, however.

Also, Dave may not have replied because he's not online at this time, or not observing this thread. I'm sure that he would have responded to you had he seen your most recent posts.

[Jazzzoline]

Originally posted by Ron Thorne
Jazzzoline, I'm confident (as was Moné) that Dr. Dave meant nothing negative with his post #18. I'm confident that we have a language/communication problem here, not an insult directed at you. Typically, tongue-in-cheek remarks shouldn't and don't (usually) require an explanation. Computer "conversations" are never as clear as face-to-face encounters, however.

Also, Dave may not have replied because he's not online at this time, or not observing this thread. I'm sure that he would have responded to you had he seen your most recent posts.

Hmm, he was online then :( Happy belated aniversary" ("vibrant community"??))

Are you suggesting my reaction would be better if he had told me "You are a very naughty person, and require discipline" face to face, looking straight into my eyes??
Hah!
*wondering what my reaction would acutally be, since noboby has ever had the nerve to tell me this face to face*

[Tom Storer]

Jazzoline, I think Dr. Dave was taking the "dirty email" theme and running with it by evoking the world of consensual sadomasochism, in much the same way you teased Chris A by implying he had a lecherous interest in the "schoolgirls going wild" emails in his inbox. This is evidence that he did indeed understand the spirit of your reply to Chris, and indeed wished to enter into that spirit.

But instead you disciplined him. Clearly he mistook a top for a bottom.

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by Tom Storer
But instead you disciplined him. Clearly he mistook a top for a bottom.

What is it with you Earthlings and anal probing?

[Jazzzoline]

Can't wait for him to explain

[clinthopson]

jazzo-

Chill!

[Jazzzoline]

I'm cool, believe me

[frankenmeister7]

Monte Smith will you please refrain from making me laugh all of the time.............

As for Jazzoline, please explain the disgusting display of feet as your avator.

they can't be men. since i have an aversion to long nails, can you please just leave your name, or is that being to smug on my part.

thank you,

francesca

[Jazzzoline]

I hate long nails too, believe me. Those feet can't be real. That's why I think maybe they are men's. And I thought that avatar would please the weirdos of this board, assuming there are a few. I was bored of my furry boots.. spring is coming after all.

Well Frankmeister, you'll have to see them until I find something else. Hoping you don't have your dinner while reading this board.

* wondering who is a weirdo and who is not *

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by Jazzzoline
I'm not sure how to take this.. please help me see through it before I loose control of my fingers on the keyboard....

I just wish you'd lose those toenails.



Ack.

[GoodSpeak]

Just a joke, Jazzzoline.



Don't get yer undies in a bunch over it, OK?


























sheesh.

[frankenmeister7]

if im not mistaken, the late Barry Whites ex has long figurenails. they are about 3 to 4 inches long. never did see her feet though. she is also not as dark as Barry White was............so who is to say. maybe they are her feet.......or this blond from chicago that i worked with at one time.

long tall job with the longest of nails. not too many brains in that blond head of hers but she had pretty feet.

i just can't take long fingernails. yeah jazzz there are a lot of weirdos on the net. we did have our share at JCS.

how i miss the old barn yard days of JCS. i feel sorry for the folks that never did get a chance to be their. oh well.

that old yellow brick road of memories, sometimes leads to the bad side of streets or up to tony sopranos back yard pool.

and why is he acting this season like a female on her first date who got felt up in the back of a cab.. ...... for goodness sakes!!!!!!!!shut up bro!!!!

[Jazzzoline]

can you imagine the sheets shredding with such toenails?

[GoodSpeak]

Ack.