Identity Thieves: Motives and Methods

Foreword

vii foreword examined over the span of centuries, images of crime—and of the faces of those who commit crimes—create a shifting mosaic. Crimes once commonplace disappear or decline in significance, while newer ones appear and take on greater importance in the public mind. stalking, environmental degradation, and Internet child pornography were not part of crime in most Western nations until late in the twentieth century. When new crimes are designated and gain attention, control experts typically promote self-interested and almost certainly exaggerated notions about the threat they pose. Likewise, the challenge of responding to the new criminals is sketched as an unusually difficult one that demands increased attention and resources. Because of these historical dynamics , shining an empirical light on emergent forms of crime becomes an important job. doing so can challenge or correct weakly substantiated claims and help arbitrate disputes on the basis of evidence. This excellent book by heith Copes and Lynne vieraitis performs this valuable task for identity theft and exploitation, and for claims about the nature of those who commit these crimes. Identity theft appears to be as old as organized commerce, but the means by which it is accomplished—and its consequences— changed dramatically in the years just prior to the onset of the twenty-first century. as its prevalence increased, so did the level of fear and anxiety reported by ordinary citizens. The timing of this book’s appearance could scarcely be better. The portrait it presents of those who steal and exploit others’ identities may surprise readers and correct misinformation. Whether or not it will allay anxiety and fear is another matter. Identity Thieves gives us the first close-up look at men and women convicted and sentenced for identity theft that is based viii foreword on a sample large enough to warrant generalization. Copes and vieraitis find that not all identity theft is cut from the same cloth; it can be committed by offenders with lengthy criminal records or by criminal neophytes. The techniques for successfully committing it are neither so complex nor arcane as to defy independent invention and use. Identity theft is committed by solitary individuals as well as by groups of criminals in ad hoc organizations with specialized roles. some identity thieves appear but one or two short steps removed from the underclass and a lumpenproletariat of criminal acquisition, but others have outwardly respectable middle-class backgrounds and lives. similarly, a continual quest for monies to support consumption of illicit drugs drives some, but not all, identity thieves. This diversity in identity theft is important for what it suggests about larger problems of white-collar crime, efforts to explain it and to fashion control responses, and divergent opinions as to what these responses should be. For many investigators, it is the materially and morally privileged worlds of offenders that distinguishes and justifies the theoretical designation and examination of white-collar crime; for others, however, it is the qualities of criminal offenses, without regard to the social characteristics of its perpetrators. Most street criminals would say that white-collar criminals generally do not “rip it off,” but “talk it off” instead. It is this operating style that makes them white-collar criminals, and that style fairly describes a large part of the conduct of identity thieves. still, they and their crimes differ glaringly from the demographics, lives, and crimes of upperworld white-collar criminals. International investment bankers, national political leaders, and similarly situated criminals have little in common with identity thieves, bankruptcy fraudsters, criminal telemarketers, mortgage origination fraudsters , insurance fraudsters, and other ordinary white-collar offenders . In their backgrounds, lives, and perspectives the two groups are strikingly different. as ordinary white-collar criminals, the ways in which identity thieves differ among themselves are notably similar to what has foreword ix been found in studies of comparable offender samples. a substantial proportion of ordinary white-collar criminals have official histories of street-crime participation, for example, and yet offenses that differ in no important way also are committed by offenders whose lives and crimes amply justify what they have been called: crimes of the middle-class. There are clear theoretical pointers and lessons in this book. one obvious message involves the consequences of the veritable explosion of opportunities for ordinary white-collar crime in recent decades. The positive relationship between the supply of white-collarcriminalopportunitiesandthevariationinwhite-collar crime can be interpreted in a straightforward fashion using the...