[Dave Birch] I’ve been thinking about identity theft because of a meeting I’m going to later on today and I was mulling over the different kinds of identity theft. It seems as if most of the identity theft we here about is really just “simple” credit card fraud, but of course there are other bigger and potentially more serious kinds of identity theft. But, once again, I must ask to what extent those crimes are the super new 21st century crime of identity theft and to what extent they are old-fashioned deception. Here is a case in point. I”m pretty sure I saw this on The Real Hustle on the BBC a few weeks ago, so I wonder if this is where the perps picked up the idea?
A brazen swindle in Wheaton last week in which a man walked into a BB&T bank dressed as an armored truck courier and walked out with $574,500 in cash has been linked to a similar bank job the next day in Washington, authorities in Montgomery County said yesterday. Assistant State’s Attorney Marybeth Ayres named Elizabeth K. Tarke, a teller at the BB&T branch, as a possible ringleader.
[From Teller Called Possible Ringleader in Two Bank Thefts - washingtonpost.com]
If you were going to pretend to be somebody else for half an hour, who would it be? Me, or a cash collector? The story says that an employee checked the bogus courier’s ID card. But how? I really doubt that the bank employee took off the courier’s ID card and put the ID card into a machine and had the courier put his eyes up to an iris scanner to match his iris to the card and then went online to have the card credentials verified by the courier company and bank servers. I’m sure the story means that the employee glanced at the ID card and it seemed about right.
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