December 25, 2002 News & Views » Citizen Servatius

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The Perfect Crime 

Mecklenburg's identity theft free-for-all

If someone broke into your home, robbed you blind and, before they drove off in your car, left you their name, home address and phone number, you'd probably be right to assume that law enforcement would at least bother to check it out. But if that same person used your Social Security number or credit card numbers to steal $6,000 from you and ruin your credit, you'd pretty much be out of luck, especially if that person didn't live within the county limits.Charlottean Mary Elizabeth Burden found this out the hard way. Burden knows the identity, phone number and Atlanta address of the woman who used her check card number to steal $700 from her Bank of America checking account and open $5,000 accounts with Banana Republic and FCNB, the financing company for Gateway Computers, in her name.

The woman's name is Mary Robertson, and she's probably done this enough times before to know that there is virtually no penalty for this crime. Robertson was so brazen that she attached her personal address to every fraudulent account she opened and to two credit inquiries. Burden has even spoken to the woman by phone, when she called Robertson's home and asked for herself.

And no one cares. When she called the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department, Burden was told she could file an incident report but that it would be cost prohibitive for CMPD to call the Atlanta police department to follow up on the matter and that since Robertson doesn't live here, there is nothing they can do. The Atlanta police department was equally enthusiastic about pursuing the matter when Burden called them. Detective A. Fickling with the fraud division could find no record of a complaint ever being made by Burden when I called to ask about the matter. The man I spoke to with the Secret Service, whom Burden also called, told me they only pursue identity theft cases over $100,000 and suggested I call the FBI. The FBI told me they had no jurisdiction in the matter and to call the Secret Service. Representatives of the North Carolina Attorney General's Office told Burden and me the same thing -- sorry, the amount of money involved was too small for them to pursue.

When I asked Mecklenburg County District Attorney Peter Gilchrist about the situation, he couldn't tell me how many if any identity fraud cases his office had prosecuted because his cash-strapped operation still lacks the ability to track such information. And besides, prosecuting this kind of case would involve flying witnesses and investigators into and out of town, Gilchrist said, which makes pursuing it cost prohibitive.

Meanwhile, the charges Robertson ran up remain on Burden's credit card, marked, for the time being, as "disputed." She's spent hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours straightening out her credit, and the end is not yet in sight.

National studies have shown that Burden's case isn't unusual. Between a third and a half of those who commit identity fraud don't live in the same municipality as the person whose identity they stole. And while $6,000 may be a lot of money to a single, middle-class woman, amounts this small almost never merit attention from authorities, which means that only those with large incomes and credit capacity have any real hope that someone, anyone, will bother to pursue the person who stole from them or ruined their credit.

Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the nation, hitting nearly 1.1 million people in 2001 for an average of nearly $7,000 each. Over the next few years those annual numbers are expected to grow exponentially as organized crime rings begin to specialize in identity fraud on an unprecedented scale. Earlier this month, federal authorities busted three men in New York who stole the credit information of more than 30,000 people off the Internet and used it to rake in at least $3 million in stolen money and goods.

My point is that this is a crime our local and state officials can no longer afford to ignore. The Orlando police department has figured this out, and has had some success teaming up with state and federal authorities to investigate and prosecute this crime. But that's not enough. Our state legislators and members of Congress could do far more than they're doing to make identity theft more difficult to commit. The federal and state identity theft laws currently on the books are geared toward harsher penalties for the identity thieves law enforcement isn't bothering to pursue. What's missing are federal and state statutes that hold credit issuers and credit bureaus liable to the consumer for their negligence and laws barring them from selling, transferring or sharing their credit files without consumers' permission.

Legislation that would have begun to accomplish these things died quietly in the US House Banking Committee in 2000. That's allowed these companies to use credit fraud as a tax write-off rather than going to the expense and trouble of more thoroughly verifying credit applications.

And that has kept people like Mary Robertson in business.

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