Reading 2

Unit 3-Reading 2

Page 41

ID FRAUD

All the places for new students had been taken at a prestigious elementary school in London, England. The school had a waiting list. Any places that opened up would be offered to children at the top of the list. One child (let’s call her Wendy) was near, but not at, the top. Adjacent to her on the list, one step higher, was another girl (let’s call her Jane).

Wendy’s mother set up an email account in the name of Jane’s mother and sent the school an email asking them to remove Jane from the waiting list. Consequently, Wendy rose one step. The fraud was discovered when Jane’s real mother called the school to ask about the list. By the way, Wendy and Jane were only four years old.

Wendy’s mother participated in a small-scale act of Internet fraud. This case of false identity was not very serious—except perhaps to Jane’s mother. The school had no effective way of checking identification, probably because it did not anticipate cheating by desperate parents.

It was especially vulnerable to fraud on the Internet, since no face-to-face contact occurred. If Wendy’s mother had actually had to go to the school to remove Jane, someone might have recognized her. Even better, if she had been required to show an identification (ID) card, the fraud could probably not have been committed at all.

FAXE IDS

Her scheme almost worked because she successfully established a false identity, even if only for a short time. Anonymity* is a fraudster’s best friend, but a fake identity can be the next-best. Establishing someone’s true identity is extremely difficult, even beyond the Internet.

In most countries, the basic mechanism is a national identification card with a picture and basic personal data (address, height, etc.). In some countries (e.g., India, the United States, and the United Kingdom), no national ID card is issued, but driver’s licenses typically serve the same purposes. Without a believable ID, you can’t get a job, pass through airport security, or even Stay at a hotel.

The problem is that fake ID cards are relatively easy to make. In earlier times, cutting out pictures and pasting them on hand-typed cardboard usually did the job. In the 1960s, a so teenager named Frank Abagnale, equipped only with scissors and a typewriter, made a fake ID that convinced people he was an airline pilot. Now things are not so simple.

Modern IDs are almost all made of plastic with numbers and letters pressed onto them by powerful machines, with holograms showing pictures or information, and with magnetic strips on the back.

The process to fake an ID card involves expensive equipment such as presses to stamp the cards, good laser so printers to apply type to the plastic, and encoders (devices that put information on magnetic strips). Anyone who undertakes such expenses probably won’t just make one ID for himself or herself. Rather, fakers will sell their services and produce false IDs for other people. They can mahe a good profit doing this, usually about $92 for every $100 of fake ID sold.

WHO NEEDS FAKES?

In 2004, agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided a beauty parlor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was selling a lot more than haircuts. FBI agents said that, while monitoring the shop for six months, they had seen beauty shop customers buy passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and other identity documents. The FBI did not claim the shop owners actually made the documents but that they earned money by passing them on to customers. Their profit on a valid U.S. passport, for example, was reportedly about $1000.

Who would want a false ID? The list is long. An otherwise ordinary person might try to disappear to escape money troubles, a police Investigation, an unhappy family life, or some other circumstance by simply moving far away and pretending to be someone else. Some people even stage their own “deaths” so their families can collect money from life insurance policies. First they disappear in some way that justifies the assumption that they’re dead, such as swimming out to sea and never returning. Then comes the hard part. In order to get a job or rent an apartment somewhere new, they need fahe documents. That’s where places like the Milwaukee beauty shop come in.

NOT FOR AMATEURS

Getting a fake ID is illegal and dangerous, perhaps putting a buyer in contact with criminals or leading into a police trap to capture fraudsters. Also, the process often goes wrong when an inexperienced person tries it. A man from Hong Kong named Steven Chin Leung had quite a lot of trouble trying to use fake IDs. First, he was charged in the U.S. state of Hawaii for trying to get a U.S. passport illegally.

To escape those charges, he went to New York and disappeared after the September 11 terrorist attack, when it was impossible to tell who was killed. He was finally caught while trying to get another document—his own death certificate—by illegally pretending to be his brother. Authorities knew something was wrong when their research showed that Leung actually had no brothers.

Governments and other issuers of IDs constantly modify their systems to stay ahead of the fakers, but it’s hard to do. The ID-making equipment can be legally purchased because it has other, perfectly legal uses. Software for putting holograms on ID cards or encoding magnetic strips is easily availab1e on the Internet.

Perhaps the future of government IDs can be seen in the new cards issued by the European nation of Albania. In addition to the usual features— picture, signature, and so on—the Albanian cared has a biometric ID feature. The fingerprints of the legal holder are encoded on a microchip within the card so they can be analyzed if there is any controversy over whether the ID is valid. The question now is whether the ID fraud industry can find a way to beat even this identification feature.