New Fraud: Identity Fiction
Sophisticated identity thieves now have a new bag of tricks up their sleeves. Instead of stealing an actual person’s identity and siphoning money from his or her holdings, the new breed of ID fraudsters simply tricks banks and merchants into granting credit to nonexistent people.
One such “synthetic” identify thief, working with a partner, persuaded issuers to send hundreds of credit cards to a man they knew as Adam Gregory and “as many as 500 other fake personas,” recounts the Wall Street Journal (reg. req.). Together, they stole some $750,000 over a two-year period.
In fact, there was no such person as Adam Gregory, of course, but the credit issuers didn’t know that. They thought all of the fake identities were real people, because the actual man behind the mask and his partner had managed to trick credit bureaus into creating what seemed like legitimate files on the nonexistent identities. To do so, the partners in crime allegedly mixed real and fake information, combining, for example, an actual social security number with a fake name. Eventually, as the fictionalized file got more and more hits, the credit reporting agencies started to think it was a real file for a real person.
Even though it was a scam, persuading credit issuers to hand over the swag wasn’t all play and no work. “The conspirators needed addresses for their synthetic identities and for a dozen or so shell companies that helped to facilitate the scam. Eventually they rented 200-odd apartments in 14 states,” the newspaper recounts. “They kept binders of data in their Phoenix headquarters to keep the details straight.”
