Fergie's Tech Blog

Identity Thief Finds Easy Money Hard to Resist

Tom Zeller Jr. writes in The New York Times:

By the time of Shiva Brent Sharma's third arrest for identity theft, at the age of 20, he had taken in well over $150,000 in cash and merchandise in his brief career. After a certain point, investigators stopped counting.

The biggest money was coming in at the end, postal inspectors said, after Mr. Sharma had figured out how to buy access to stolen credit card accounts online, change the cardholder information and reliably wire money to himself — sometimes using false identities for which he had created pristine driver's licenses.

But Mr. Sharma, now 22, says he never really kept track of his earnings.

posted by Fergie @ 7/04/2006 06:43:00 AM