LifeLock Blog

Captain Jason LaSart, of the Mille Lacs County Sheriff’s Department worked a lot of identity theft cases during his time on the Minnesota Crime Task Force, and he has a lot of stories to tell.

One of them is about a woman in her 60s who filled out a Medicare supplemental health insurance application with her medical information, name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and bank account numbers.

Three months later she began getting disturbing calls and letters from people who said they worked for bill collectors. She always paid her bills on time and had heard warnings about telephone scammers bent on identity theft, so she tore up the letters and hung up on the callers.

Six months after she put the application in her mailbox and raised the little red flag she learned she’d become an ID theft victim–someone in Florida used her information to open at least eight credit card accounts and maxed them out.

The insurance company never received her application. LaSart believes someone stole it from her mailbox and sold her information over the Internet.

So how can this kind of theft be avoided?

Never leave outgoing mail in an unlocked home mailbox. Replace yours with one that locks, or take outgoing mail to a United State Postal Service box.

Personal and financial information is commonly bought, sold and traded over the Internet. Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their eRecon service that scours the Internet for customers’ information so thieves can be stopped before any damage is done.

Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE and pay only $9 a month for the identity theft protection services chosen by nearly 1.5 million other Americans.

Law enforcement officials have known for years that stolen identities are bought, sold and traded in highly secretive online chat rooms and forums. In fact, last year, the FBI revealed that Dark Market, a forum that catered to international identity theft entrepreneurs, was launched by them as part of a two-year sting operation.

Now, however, identity thieves are becoming shockingly brazen in e-marketing their stolen wares. A YouTube video that has recently been pulled is an example of this trend. In it, the poster is shown rifling through his wares: manila folders he claims contain his victims’ names, addresses, genders, Social Security numbers, mothers’ names, driver’s license numbers, birth dates, employment information, credit reports, net worth and details of real estate holdings and financial accounts.

Armed with that much information, there is virtually no limit to the damage that could be inflicted on the identity theft victims.

The seller offers this information for as little as $25 for a single data set, or $100 for five. The seller gave no indication in the video of how he obtained the information, or the extent of his inventory. However, in an email exchange with an investigate reporter, he offered to sell 100 of the identity sets, and directed the reporter to deposit payment into a PayPal account.

LifeLock provides their nearly 1.5 million members with eRecon™, a service that scours thousands of websites for the enrollees’ personal or financial information. If LifeLock members’ data are detected, they are immediately notified and LifeLock’s Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialists assist them in resolution or recovery as needed.

Only LifeLock offers eRecon™. To learn more about this exclusive service visit LifeLock.com. Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE for the lowest available price.

A Colorado man has been arrested and indicted by a state grand jury for stealing the identities of nearly two-dozen individuals and using their personal information to pass more than $24,000 in forged checks in 10 Colorado counties.

In addition to stealing the identities of real people, Timothy Kuskowski is accused of committing what’s known as “synthetic identity theft,” which involves using some of a real person’s identifying information, and combining it with other entirely fabricated information. In other cases, synthetic identity theft may be committed with only fabricated identifying information.

Kuskowski passed “a plethora” of forged and fraudulent checks between December 2007 and June 2008. Delta Colorado police officers also found many forged checks and multiple ID cards when they arrested Kuskowski last June.

Additional evidence against the accused includes store-surveillance videos, fingerprints and forensic examination of identifying documents and checks.

Among the many checks allegedly passed by the defendant are several fraudulent payroll checks, some made out to the identity theft victims and others made out to fictional names.

Kuskowski, 45, has been charged with the following felonies:

• One count of theft in the amount of $20,000 or more
• 13 counts of identity theft
• 10 counts of forgery
• One count of criminal impersonation

There’s nothing in the 18-page indictment regarding how Kuskowski might have obtained the personal information of the many identity theft victims.

For two years Dark Market provided an exclusive marketplace for 2,500 of the world’s most accomplished identity thieves to buy, sell and trade stolen identities. “Dark Market” provided its carefully vetted members a country club of sorts where the professionals could meet to compare and review professional practices and tools.

What this elite group didn’t realize was that Dark Market was a Federal Bureau of Investigation snare. Master Splyntr, the site’s administrator, was actually J. Keith Mularski, an FBI agent. And, though the criminals thought Splyntr was logging on somewhere in Eastern Europe, in fact, he was working at National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, PA.

Before the site was closed down last month millions of dollars had changed hands among the thieves. But while the site was up, it netted 56 arrests and saved $70 million in losses.

Shawn Henry, FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director, said the sting was a coordinated effort between the Bureau, the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency and other agencies in Turkey and Germany.

October 4th Master Splyntr notified forum members that the site was being closed down because of attention it was receiving from “a lot of the world services (agents of FBI, SS, and Interpol).”

In fact, the site was shut down and the information-gathering phase of the operation brought to a close after another of the site’s administrators, Chao, was arrested in Turkey for kidnapping and torturing a police informant.