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It Takes a Thief

© Alan Kotok

One way to guarantee that an issue gets moved to the top of the national political agenda is to have it hit hard the rich and famous. AIDS activists, for example, point to HIV or AIDS afflicting celebrities such as Magic Johnson or the late Rock Hudson as turning points in making the issue a topic of household conversation. In the same way, we can now expect identity theft to become a more potent issue, now that members of the Forbes magazine list of the richest 400 people in America became the latest targets of an alleged cyber-crime plot.

The New York Post broke the story on March 20, 2001, citing indictments alleging Abraham Abdallah, a Brooklyn restaurant worker, used computers in the public library to gain credit, banking, and brokerage records of the financial and entertainment elite. In an elaborate scheme, Abdallah allegedly got enough confidential and personal information to electronically impersonate his victims.

In the scam, according to records cited by the Post, Abdallah allegedly gained access to credit files at Experian, TRW, and Equifax, as well as accounts at leading brokerage houses and investment banks. The Post story said that police recovered a dog-eared copy of last fall’s Forbes 400 issue with home addresses, cell phone numbers, bank account data, and even mother’s maiden names written by the photos and biographies.

Perhaps this incident will now help Congress take the issue a little more seriously. Two weeks before Abdallah’s arrest, on March 6, the FBI’s Internet Fraud Complaint Center noted that in its first six months, it logged over 20,000 reports from citizens – none apparently in the Forbes 400 list – complaining of Internet scams. Over 6,000 of those complaints had enough substance to warrant referrals to enforcement agencies. Several complaints involved losses over $100,000, with one reaching over $300,000 in value.

A dedicated identity thief could have started his or her career with the Internal Revenue Service computers, according to results of another blistering study, also released in March. About a week before the Abdallah arrest, the General Accounting Office (GAO), Congress’s watchdog and audit agency, issued a report that found security holes in the electronic filing program called e-file, used by over 35 million taxpayers in the year 2000 filing season.

According to the report, GAO investigators demonstrated that IRS controls did not adequately protect against internal or external intrusions, and misuse of the data found on electronically filed returns. The weaknesses noted in the report include:

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