The Darkest Side of Identity Theft

When impostors are arrested, victims get criminal records

By Bob Sullivan (MSNBC - March 9, 2003)

Malcolm Byrd was home with his two children on a Saturday night when a knock came at the door. Three Rock County, Wis., sheriff’s officers were there with a warrant for Byrd’s arrest. Cocaine possession, with intent to distribute, it said. Byrd tried to tell them that they had the wrong man, that it was a case of mistaken identity, that he was a victim of identity theft. But they wouldn’t listen. Instead they put him in handcuffs and drove him away. Again.

IT WAS NOTHING new for Byrd, who has spent much of the past five years trying — unsuccessfully — to talk skeptical police officers out of arresting him. But this time, it was worse. Two days later, he was still in jail.

This is the worst-case scenario for identity theft victims. Losing your clean credit history is one thing; losing your freedom is another. And victims of America’s fastest-growing crime are discovering they often have much more to worry about than the hundreds of hours of paperwork necessary to clean up the financial mess associated with ID theft. Sometimes, they have to worry about ending up in jail — again and again.

Read the Rest of the Story and steps you should take if you find yourself a similar victim of Indentity Theft.

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U.S. Olympic Chief Quits Over Lies on College Degrees

 By FRANK LITSKY (New York Times, 25May2002)

Sandra Baldwin, the first woman to become president and chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, resigned yesterday, a day after she acknowledged that she had lied on her résumé about her academic credentials.

Mrs. Baldwin's resignation was the latest embarrassment for the American Olympic movement, and the latest example of a sports figure inflating professional and academic achievements.

According to Mrs. Baldwin's U.S.O.C. biography, she graduated from the University of Colorado in 1962 and received a doctorate in American literature from Arizona State in 1967. On Thursday, she acknowledged that she left Colorado in 1959 after three years at the university, and received a bachelor's degree from Arizona State in 1962. She said she completed doctoral studies at Arizona State, but did not have time to do the dissertation because she had to care for her two children and run the family farm after her parents died. Mrs. Baldwin subsequently taught English at Arizona State for 11 years before starting a real-estate firm in the early 1980's.

She disclosed the discrepancies on her résumé after she learned that a University of Colorado student who had interviewed her for an alumni publication was going to reveal the information.

On Wednesday night, Mrs. Baldwin left a meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and returned to the United States. On Thursday, in a letter to members of the U.S.O.C. executive committee, she said: "I do not think I have hurt the credibility of the U.S.O.C. I have certainly hurt my own, and I ask you to carefully consider the best course of action for the organization."

Yesterday morning, Mrs. Baldwin, 62, held a teleconference with the 23 members of the U.S.O.C.'s executive committee. Later, while the committee was deliberating without her, she resigned, saying in a statement released by the U.S.O.C., "I accept full responsibility for the mistakes I have made."

"I should have changed it a long time ago, but once it was published it got paralyzing," Mrs. Baldwin said. "Now I'm going to have to live with it for the rest of my life."

Bill Stapleton of Austin, Tex., a U.S.O.C. vice president and former Olympic swimmer, took part in the teleconference with Mrs. Baldwin.

"She was on for 15 minutes, and questions were asked," he said. "She was embarrassed. She said it was a big mistake and said she should have corrected it. Nobody asked for an explanation. When she hung up, we discussed it and recommended that it be referred to the ethics committee. By then, I think she had made the decision to resign."

She resigned, effective immediately, during a telephone call with Lloyd Ward, the U.S.O.C.'s chief executive officer. In making the announcement of her resignation, Mr. Ward said: "She did what she considered best for the U.S.O.C. and the Olympic movement."

The U.S.O.C. president is deeply involved in pulling together the disparate governing bodies of the various Olympic sports to set goals and policy for each Olympic Games. Mrs. Baldwin's departure is not expected to change the U.S.O.C.'s direction significantly because preparations are already under way for the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.

Mrs. Baldwin became the U.S.O.C.'s 22nd president at a difficult time for the American Olympic movement. Allegations were swirling that international Olympic officials had been bribed to award the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City; several high-profile sponsors had withdrawn their support for the Games; and the U.S.O.C. was having financial difficulties.

Despite a figure-skating scandal that threatened to become all-consuming, the Salt Lake Games were widely regarded as a commercial and competitive success, and Mrs. Baldwin was praised for her role in salvaging them.

Under U.S.O.C. bylaws, the executive committee will meet as soon as possible to nominate one or more candidates to replace Mrs. Baldwin. A mail ballot will then be sent to the organization's 119-member board. If no candidate receives a majority vote, the executive committee will submit one nominee to the board in November. One committee spokesman said a decision on the next president could be reached within weeks.

One prospective nominee is Paul E. George of Wellesley, Mass., a former president of the United States Figure Skating Association. Mr. George, one of the U.S.O.C.'s five vice presidents, lost a close vote to Mrs. Baldwin in the 2000 election for president. Another potential candidate is Bill Hybl, Mrs. Baldwin's predecessor.

Until a successor is chosen, the bylaws specify that the vice president-secretariat serves as acting president. She is Marty Mankamyer of Colorado Springs, a board member since 1990.

Mrs. Baldwin, a real-estate broker in Phoenix and a former president of USA Swimming, had served the U.S.O.C. as treasurer and vice president before she was elected in December 2000 to a four-year term as president.

Since February, Mrs. Baldwin has been one of four American members of the International Olympic Committee. Dr. Jacques Rogge, the I.O.C. president, said Mrs. Baldwin would automatically lose her seat.

The resignation was yet another setback for the Olympic movement in the United States. Thomas K. Welch and David R. Johnson, once the chief organizers for the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, were indicted on federal charges of misusing funds to induce I.O.C. members to award the Games to Salt Lake City. A federal judge threw out the charges, but the government has appealed.

In 1991, Robert Helmick resigned as the U.S.O.C. president after he was accused of using his position for personal gain.

The resignation marked another instance of sports figures inflating their résumés. In December, six days after being named head football coach at Notre Dame, George O'Leary resigned after acknowledging he had lied about his football and academics achievements.

On May 2, a day after he moved from Colorado State to Vanderbilt as the women's basketball coach, Tom Collen resigned after discrepancies were discovered in his résumé.

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Your Thumb Here: Newest ID of Choice at Store and on Job

NEW YORK TIMES - February 20, 2002
By PETER T. KILBORN

EAUMONT, Tex., Feb. 16 — Little blue discs with lids, about the size of 50-cent pieces, are glued on the counter close to each of the three cash registers at Sam's Package Store. When an unfamiliar customer writes a check, Peggi Parigi, owner of the store with her husband, asks for a driver's license, a place of work and a phone number. Then she points to a disc.

"I need a right thumbprint," she told Ann Harris, 46, who was paying $21.65 for a bottle of Royal Crown whiskey.

"For what?" Ms. Harris, a department manager at Wal-Mart , said she thought. "I'm not a criminal."

This was Ms. Harris's first encounter with thumbprinting. It probably will not be her last. In this busy oil town in southeastern Texas, and for that matter in most of Texas and in much of California, the Middle West and Florida, what was once acceptable only for criminals is becoming routine for consumers who cash checks at places other than their own banks and at supermarkets, liquor stores and check-cashing shops.

A growing reliance on fingerprinting has stirred little public opposition in a nation increasingly troubled by terrorism and identity theft, and even more widespread use of it is on the way. In December, a McDonald's in Fresno, Calif., installed an electronic terminal that collects thumbprints and credit card numbers from customers who want to pay for their meals simply by touching a scanner. Sometime this year, the 45,000 employees at H.E.B. supermarkets in Texas will punch in not with timecards but by pressing a finger on a terminal. States including Texas, California and Georgia require thumbprints on driver's licenses.

Businesses and government agencies defend the practice as a reasonable response to the widespread traffic in false identifications. But civil rights advocates worry that fingerprinting is being used to intimidate people who patronize businesses that serve lower-income people. Some wonder if fingerprint databases can be protected from abuse.

Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, said the technology can protect privacy, making it harder for a thief to use a stolen charge card encoded with a thumbprint. But Mr. Crews said that big, compulsory databases, like those for driver's licenses and other ID's that store people's finger or facial images, can be abused by officials, identity thieves or others who find a way into them. "You create a honey pot for hackers," he said.

Like it or not, though, the change is coming, said William Rogers, publisher of the Biometrics Digest, a newsletter in St. Louis devoted to covering the technology of human recognition. "Government, health care, finance, school systems, those are all areas that are looking at this," Mr. Rogers said. Concern for terrorism has only hastened the trend. "Since Sept. 11, there has been a tremendous focus on this," he said.

In many ways, the trend is already advanced. John Hall, spokesman for the American Bankers Association, said half the nation's biggest banks — those like Citibank, the Bank of America and Bank One , with assets above $5 billion — take thumbprints at some of their branches. The Kansas State Bankers Association says that 200 banks and 60 stores in the state take thumbprints.

Nevada casinos and Levitz Furniture stores take thumbprints of customers cashing and paying with checks. Kroger supermarkets in Columbus, Ohio, ask for thumbprints on checks. So do Miami pawnshops.

Stirred by charges that a Virginia notary public helped one or more of the Sept. 11 hijackers obtain fraudulent ID's, the National Notary Public Association is urging its members to put their own thumbprints and clients' on all transaction documents.

"It creates a hurdle for the imposters who circulate among us," said Charles N. Faerber, vice president of the association.

By all accounts, Texas is the nation's leading proponent of consumer thumbprinting. The Texas Bankers Association bought 80,000 fingerprint pads from Signature Security Inc. of Omaha last year. The pads sell for $2 to $5 each, depending on the size of an order. The pads, up to two inches in diameter, are cleaner to use than the pads used by police departments. Pressed on a check, the ink leaves a clear black print, but it disappears from the thumb with slight rubbing. The association sold the pads to nearly half the banks in Texas and to banks in 37 other states, said Lenelle Freeman, the group's senior vice president.

Thumbprinting took off in Texas after lawmakers voted in 1994 to require thumbprints of applicants for driver's licenses. The law proved useful to businesses, which quickly understood that the state's driver's license databank could be used to track down and collect from people who had written bad checks.

Beaumont has embraced thumbprinting. Some employers here ask job applicants to submit thumbprints to prevent identity and credential fraud. The liquor stores and check- cashing outlets, most banks, several credit unions, the Market Basket Foods and Lucky 7 supermarkets in town and the Cowboy Harley-Davidson dealership all ask for prints on checks — including tax refund checks and paychecks.

At United Check Cashing, across the street from Sam's, thumbprinting is required of all but the most regular customers. The store asks for two right thumbprints — one on the check and one for their files.

On a warm winter day, most customers there went along without grimace or complaint. Gregory George, 33, an architect, was between jobs and moving from Austin to Beaumont. Served the moment he walked in, he provided the two thumbprints and cashed his last paycheck, less the store's 3 percent fee.

"I don't feel any stigma," Mr. George said. "I think it safeguards the check holder. It's proof of who you are. No one else can cash your check."

Another customer disagreed. "I don't like it," said Randy Green, an accountant, who cashed a paycheck after his bank closed. "It's treating honest people like criminals."

Thumbprinting has largely put an end to bad checks, said Polly Matlock, owner of the United Check Cashing store. Before the company started requiring prints, the store was stuck with $8,115 in bad checks from a total of $1,046,839.83 it cashed.

The loss rate, 0.77 percent, was low for a check-cashing shop, but since thumbprinting began there two years ago, the rate has been even lower. Opening her books, Ms. Matlock showed a 0.25 percent loss rate in January. In February, she said, the store has done $1.2 million in business without a single bad check.

"Once you start thumbprinting and it gets out on the street," Ms. Matlock said, "the word goes around not to mess with that store."

The growing tolerance here for thumbprinting might help lay the groundwork for the leap to more sophisticated technologies. A fingerprint might not be a perfect representation of an individual, but despite recent court challenges concerning its reliability, the industry considers it better than anything but a swab of DNA. Many companies working with biometrics also contend that prints are easier and less expensive to scan and codify electronically than images of faces, hands, voices or eyes. Such technologies could be used, for example, to let consumers use thumbprints instead of personal identification numbers to get money from A.T.M.'s.

"Fingerprint biometrics is probably the best," said Joel S. Lisker, senior vice president for security and risk management at MasterCard International, which is testing biometric verification technologies.

Certainly, these technologies could also give rise to fears of loss of privacy. There are other concerns, too. "There is a matter of human dignity," said Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of The Privacy Journal, a newsletter in Providence, R.I. Lacking credit cards, access to A.T.M.'s and bank accounts, disproportionate numbers of the poor live on the cash they collect from checks. Being asked for a thumbprint at the teller's window can feel demeaning, Mr. Smith said. If banks that cater to the affluent use discomfort with fingerprinting to chase off the poor, it can also be discriminatory, he said.

Prints may not always be good for business. In October, Dollar Rent A Car began asking for them on rental agreements in 17 cities. It stopped in January, the company said, in part because a few customers objected.

Still, for many people in Beaumont, the systems have some appeal. "What's the big deal?" asked D. Ray Carr, 67, a telephone company retiree who was buying a six-pack of beer at Sam's. "I don't think I'm losing my personal freedom by identifying myself," Mr. Carr said. "If we had been using something like this Sept. 11, we'd have kicked those damned people out before they could blow up the World Trade Center."

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Federal Reserve Raising Awareness Regarding Identity Fraud

You might not even know it's happened. It can wreak havoc on your life and ruin you financially. Getting the record set straight can take weeks, months, maybe even years.

The media has devoted much attention to the frightening but very real threat of identity theft. Your institution may have customers that are victims of identity theft crimes. Are your employees adequately trained to assist your customers that are affected? The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank recently issued guidance addressing how financial organizations should protect customer information against identity theft. This guidance can be found at www.dallasfed.org/htm/pubs/notices/2001/01-40.html.

An educational resource is being made available from the Federal Reserve Bank. This 15-minute video, entitled Identity Theft: Protect Yourself, explains how easily someone can obtain another person's personal financial information and unlawfully use it to obtain credit or other financial information under a false name.

The video provides valuable information on what to do if you become a victim of identity theft, as well as interviews with theft victims, law enforcement officers and industry representatives.

This video is produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in conjunction with the interagency Identity Fraud Task Force, and is in VHS format. Available at $7.50 per copy, the videos may be ordered by sending a check or money order to:

Public and Community Affairs Department
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Attention: Identity Theft Video
P.O.Box 2076
Boston, MA 02106-2076

For additional information about the video, please contact the Public and Community Affairs Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston at 800-409-1333.

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Hijackers Likely Skilled with Fake IDs

By Daniel Sieberg (CNN) - September 22, 2001

FBI Director Robert Mueller has acknowledged that some of those behind last week's terror attacks may have stolen the identification of other people, and, according to at least one security expert, it may have been "relatively easy" based on their level of sophistication.

Chris McGoey is a San Francisco, California-based security consultant who has worked with numerous major retailers on combating identity theft. He's seen hundreds of falsified IDs, and while he hasn't seen the ones used by the alleged September 11 hijackers, he offers some insight into how they could have been obtained.

Fake identities can be created in a couple of different ways, he says; the perpetrators could obtain information about an actual person to get duplicate materials, or they could establish a virtual individual from scratch. The latter would be more difficult, says McGoey, since it would require the creation of documents.

According to McGoey, the key information these hijackers would have needed is Social Security numbers (often the unique identifier for business use), driver's license numbers, and date of birth or birth certificates. From there, they could assemble a new identity. Even a person's address or name would help them get started. A passport or visa would be more difficult to forge, says McGoey, but not impossible.

And since state ID such as a driver's license or birth certificate often vary by state or county, he adds, it's almost impossible for service employees to verify the authenticity.

"If you take an L.A. birth certificate to New York, they're probably not going to have a clue as to whether it's official or not," says McGoey.

"Could a common criminal on the street do this stuff? No. They're not sophisticated enough. These (the hijackers) are people who researched, planned and studied. They likely didn't have to go to a forger to do it."

Consumers unaware

In addition to obtaining the necessary documents, these hijackers would have needed to appear confident and collected when showing them, says McGoey.

"If you act like you know what you're doing, you're going to get by eight times out of 10," he says.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), identity theft crimes have been on the rise in the past year.

Adding to the difficulty for investigators is the fact that most consumers have no idea that their personal information has been misused for more than a year, sometimes more than five years, reads the FTC Web site. The average amount of time before it was noticed is about 14 months.

The FTC recommends that people regularly check their credit record, keep track of all transactions and follow up with creditors if bills do not arrive on time. Also, they suggest that people be aware of when personal information may be shared over a Web site and read all privacy regulations issued by a retailer.

Violations of the Identity Theft Act of 1998 are considered a federal crime and could be investigated by such authorities as the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Individual states also have separate legislation.

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Security Co. Fined for Bogus Files

The Associated Press
Saturday, Oct. 21, 2000

PHILADELPHIA –– An airport security company was fined more than $1.5 million for allowing untrained employees, some with criminal backgrounds, operate checkpoints at Philadelphia International Airport.

Philadelphia employees of Argenbright Holdings Ltd. had backgrounds that included drug dealing, kidnapping, aggravated assault and theft.

The company pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of making false statements to the FAA. U.S. District Judge Marvin Katz on Friday fined Argenbright $1 million – the maximum possible under federal law.

The company had agreed in April to pay $1.2 million in fines and costs for falsifying training and background checks.

Argenbright also must pay $350,000 to 38 airlines and will be on probation for three years, during which inspectors will conduct audits of its hiring and training, and $200,000 to reimburse the U.S. Attorney's Office costs to investigate and prosecute the case.

"Argenbright is deeply embarrassed by this situation," said Edward S.G. Dennis Jr., the company's attorney. "This does not represent the way they do business."

Argenbright's 25,000 employees work at all major U.S. airports, but company officials said the fraud occurred only in Philadelphia. Prosecutors said there was no evidence that the scheme, which ran from 1995 through 1998, harmed passengers, equipment or facilities.

Three former Argenbright employees have also pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud-related charges.

Sandra H. Lawrence, 61, the firm's former administrative manager in Philadelphia, was sentenced to five years' probation and fined $15,000.

Steven E. Saffer, 50, Argenbright's former district manager, and Helen Fields, 56, the company's local personnel recruiter, will be sentenced next week.

Prosecutors said Saffer devised the scheme to increase the Philadelphia office's profit margin and his bonus.

Student Priests to Get Background Checks

Associated Press
Saturday, Oct. 21, 2000

BELLEVILLE, Ill.--Prospective priests hoping to enter seminary in Belleville's Roman Catholic diocese will have to undergo criminal background checks, beginning next year, just like lay employees.

The diocese, headed by Bishop Wilton Gregory, vice president of the U.S. bishops' conference, has an extensive screening process. But a spokesman said criminal checks are needed because many priest candidates are not well known in their communities and spend years in the working world instead of coming straight from high school or college.

Vicar General James Margason said no one event prompted the criminal checks. The diocese has had a troubled history of sexual abuse by some priests and dismissed 11 in the early 1990s.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C., said subjecting church employees, volunteers and prospective priests to criminal checks is fair and becoming commonplace.

"I think you have to have the same standards for priests as you do for lay people," Walsh said.

Prosecutors Say Doctor Killed To Feel a Thrill

New York Times
September 7, 2000
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

ENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y., Sept. 6 — Most people in the courtroom knew how the small, skittish man had managed to murder at least four of his patients without getting caught: he injected them with poison, he admitted today. The question observers wanted answered was "Why?"

And then prosecutors offered five scrawled pages from the killer's spiral- bound diary as the motive. It seems that Michael J. Swango, a former doctor, killed for the pure joy of watching and smelling death.

Reading from a notebook confiscated from Mr. Swango when he was arrested in a Chicago airport in 1997 on his way to Saudi Arabia, where he had a job in a hospital, prosecutors painted a portrait of a delusional serial killer. The written passages show that Mr. Swango, 45, was a voracious reader of macabre thrillers about doctors who thought they had the power of the Almighty.

In small, tight script, Mr. Swango transcribed a passage from what prosecutors said was "The Torture Doctor," which they described as an obscure true-to-life novel published in 1975 about a 19th-century doctor who goes on a quiet murder spree and tries to poison his wife with succinylcholine chloride, a powerful muscle relaxant.

"He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world — he could feel that he was a god in disguise," the notebook read.

Another of Mr. Swango's favorite books, according to prosecutors, was "The Traveler," written by John Katzenbach. One passage that prosecutors contended offered a window into Mr. Swango's mind was: "when I kill someone, it's because I want to. It's the only way I have of reminding myself that I'm still alive."

With the victim's relatives weeping in the rear of the courtroom, Assistant United States Attorney Gary R. Brown read more excerpts from the notebook. From what he identified as the text of "My Secret Life," Mr. Swango was inspired to copy: "I love it. Sweet, husky, close smell of an indoor homicide."

Mr. Brown, on the steps of United States District Court, said today: "Basically, Dr. Swango liked to kill people. By his own admission in his diary, he killed because it thrilled him."

Wearing prison blues and faded slippers, Mr. Swango stood in the courtroom and admitted that he murdered three of his patients at a Long Island hospital with lethal injections.

Each time Judge Jacob Mishler asked Mr. Swango how he pleaded, he answered impassively: "Guilty, your honor."

Accusations, incriminations and death followed Mr. Swango wherever he went, from the time he began medical school at Southern Illinois University in the early 1980's to his tenure as a physician in Zimbabwe. And although an inordinate amount of his patients died over the years — some officials estimate as many as 60 — Mr. Swango always managed to find employment.

Prosecutors in New York could charge him only with the three murders in their jurisdiction, committed when he worked for three months as a resident at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport in 1993. His victims were Thomas Sammarco, 73; George Siano, 60; and Aldo Serini, 62, all of Long Island. He faced federal, rather than state, charges because those three murders were committed at a federal institution.

And for the first time, Mr. Swango acknowledged today that he killed Cynthia McGee, 19, a student who was in his care at Ohio State University Hospitals in 1984 when he worked there as a resident.

He was not charged with her murder, because it was not a federal crime, but he pleaded guilty to lying about his role in her death, and also to falsifying records about prison time he served in the mid-1980's for poisoning co-workers' coffee and doughnuts with ant poison.

When Judge Mishler asked for an explanation of the death of Mr. Siano, Mr. Swango read from a prepared text. "I intentionally killed Mr. Siano, who was at the time a patient at the veterans' hospital in Northport," he read. "I did this by administering a toxic substance which I knew was likely to cause death. I knew it was wrong."

Not only did Mr. Swango administer the lethal injection to Mr. Siano, prosecutors said, he did it on his day off, a day when he was not even on call. Prosecutors said that a nurse saw Mr. Swango sitting on a radiator near Mr. Siano's bed watching the man die from the lethal dose.

"I'm still shaking my head that a madman got a plea bargain today," said Mr. Siano's stepdaughter, Roselinda Conroy. "He's worse than an animal. Animals don't kill for pleasure."

Judge Mishler sentenced Mr. Swango to three consecutive life sentences, without the possibility of parole, in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.

Mary A. Dowling, director of the hospital in Northport, tried to answer the wider question of how a man with Mr. Swango's background could find employment there.

She said that he was hired by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and rotated through Northport as part of his Stony Brook residency training.

"Michael Swango failed to truthfully disclose the reason for a prior criminal conviction on his application," Ms. Dowling said, explaining that Mr. Swango had told administrators that his jail time had to do with a barroom brawl. "It was an offense he pled guilty to and for which he served three years in prison."

That explanation was not good enough for the relatives of the dead men. "He left a trail of death wherever he went," Ms. Conroy said. "Because of the gross negligence of these institutions, Swango was allowed to kill. They, too, should be held accountable."

~END

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