Fergie's Tech Blog

Analysis: Detroit Trial Shows Cyber-Scam

Shaun Waterman writes for UPI:

The case of a Michigan woman charged with identity theft has lifted a small corner of the veil over a huge series of credit-card scams, run from the former Soviet bloc, that have cost consumers and the card industry hundreds of millions of dollars.

The state attorney general's office told United Press International that Krystal Owens would go on trial Monday on three counts of identity theft and one of conspiring to commit identity theft.

But one independent investigator who has followed the case told UPI that publicly available details of the crime match a series of "identical" frauds that are netting conspirators more than $10 million a month.

The Michigan attorney general's office declined to comment further in advance of the trial, but a statement announcing the charges named her co-conspirator as Tomas Lasinkas, and identified his company and two Web sites they allegedly used to run the scam, which involved making small bogus charges to thousands of credit cards, whose numbers had been stolen.

posted by Fergie @ 2/25/2008 02:32:00 PM