Identity Thieves: Motives and Methods

Acknowledgments

xi acknowledgments This book is the culmination of our concerted effort to interview identity thieves and organize their accounts. The idea of the project came about when the two of us, who had worked across the hall from each other for several years, concluded that collaboration would be fruitful and rewarding. after brainstorming on potential projects, we serendipitously found an article on identity theft and realized this was the direction to move in. We decided to submit a grant proposal to the national Institute of Justice (nij). Because of the low number of qualitative projects funded by nij, neither of us expected a positive decision, but we caught lightning in a bottle and wereawardedthegrant.Thegrantgaveustheopportunity(orforced us, depending on one’s point of view) to travel across the country. While it was a great deal of work, we also learned a great deal. While conducting this research on identity thieves, our goals were to explore how their lifestyles and associations with others contribute to criminal decision-making, including how they account for their crimes, how they evaluate and manage the risks of stealing identities, and how they organize to carry out the act. In providing answers to these questions, we drew primarily upon rational-choice theory to interpret what the offenders said and to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding how identity thieves made sense of and carried out their acts. as a result, the book is structured in a manner comparable with other work using rational-choice theory. We hope to present the crime in a way that is true to the lived experiences of the culprits, a hallmark of sound ethnographic research. none of this would have been possible without the help and support of numerous people. We begin with thanks to the national Institute of Justice, office of Justice programs, U.s. department of xii acknowledgments Justice, who graciously funded this research endeavor (Grant no. 2005-IJ-CX-0012). Without their support we certainly would not have been able to start, much less finish, this undertaking. during the project, which took a little longer than expected, we were able to work with two excellent grant managers: Maggie heisler and Christine Crossland. We thank them for their hard work, insights, and patience. The points of view or opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.s. department of Justice. our ability to carry out the research was facilitated by employees at the Federal Bureau of prisons. victoria Joseph and Jody Klein-saffran made our travel and our lives much easier. They were a treat to work with and represented their organization well. We also thank the various wardens and other staff members at the fourteen institutions we visited. These people are the ones who we inconvenienced the most and we are greatly appreciative of their willingness to adjust their schedules and help us. our research assistants—Crystal null, Martha Mears, rachael donovan, and anastasia Brown—were asked to do much of the monotonous work. They helped us search newspapers, copy articles , transcribe interviews, and format references. In short, they helped with the more tedious tasks and we appreciate their efforts tremendously. We are grateful to the sixty-five individuals who trusted us enough to tell their stories, even though they did not know us. despite our inability to offer them any tangible benefits, they answered our calls and provided details about their lives and crimes, some of which were painful to relive. Indeed, without them this project and the resulting products (including this book) could not have been possible. We wish them well in their reformations. We also thank Claire renzetti, who brought our research to the attention of phyllis deutsch, editor-in-chief of University press of new england. although we had talked about writing a book about the identity thieves we interviewed, it was their interest in our work that kindled the spark to actually write it. We are further indebted to phyllis for pushing us to improve upon earlier versions of our manuscript. acknowledgments xiii In preparing our manuscript we sought help and suggestions from several people. robert Morris, andy hochstetler, Bruce Jacobs , and John sloan were wonderful in this regard. They read early versions of the chapters and offered comments and criticisms that improved the book immensely. While we would like to blame them for any theoretical...