The Inquisitr » identity theft

British ex-cop owns a database of 40 million stolen identities

Steven Hodson — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:45:00 +0000

Stolen identities are traded on the web all the time. The information can be as simple as credit card information and email address or in some case complete records. It is this type of trading of personal information that a British company by the name Lucid Intelligence intercepts and then stores in their own database. This database contains the records of four million Britons and 40 million people world-wide, most of which are Americans.

The database is controlled by Colin Holder who happens to be a retired Metropolitan police officer. He has spent the last four years collecting all this data through sources that include police departments around the world, which includes both the British police departments and the FBI in the US. AS well he gets information from anti-phishing and hacking groups groups.

Of course all this hasn’t come freely as Mr. Holder has invested £160,000 into the project so far. In order to recoup that money as well as turn a profit Mr. Holder is planning on letting the public access his database but for a fee.

This whole thing isn’t being done without some concerns being voiced about protection of personal data. This in turn has the Information Commissioner keeping a close eye on the database as it grows.

The legality of the database could be put to the test in the coming week. The Information Commissioner’s Office said it could not endorse a commercial service or make a ruling on its validity unless someone made a complaint. But the privacy watchdog said it had “provided advice to help the company comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act”.

Source: Times Online :: Four million British identities are up for sale on the internet

Yup I can see how moving everything we do to the cloud is going to be safer – not!

$250 plus a little war-driving equals stolen identities [VIDEO]

Steven Hodson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:14 +0000

I don’t imagine that Chris Paget is the most popular person with the State Department or the proponents of RFID enhanced passports and driver’s licences. Especially since he has proven that with as little as $250 worth of off the shelf components and some time driving around you to can become an identity farmer.

The device which Chris built in his spare time operates out of his car and contains everything needed to sniff out and then clone RFID (radio frequency identification tags) tags. In a recent example he drove around for 20 minutes in downtown San Francisco and successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.

"It’s one thing to say that something can be done, it’s another thing completely to actually do it," Paget said in explaining why he built the device. "It’s mainly to defeat the argument that you can’t do it in the real world, that there’s no real-world attack here, that it’s all theoretical."

Source: The Register

Here is the video showing his little excursion

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Currently the range of Paget’s device is about 30 feet but he says with a little modification it could read the tags up to a mile away. Apparently the Feds are to concerned with this as they say they have no plans to overhaul the technology being used. So not only do we have to worry about excessive government intrusion with this new technology but we also have to worry about our identity being stolen.

Are your kids shopping online with your info?

Steven Hodson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:55:41 +0000

An interesting study out of England reports that children between the age of 8 to 16 are spending quite a bit of money online. The problem is that they are using their parents stored info to do it with. This works out to almost one million kids who are using their parents credit card info that is stored in cookies on home computers to do their shopping online.

The children are spending an average of $48US (£25) for every illegal purchase but 5% of the kids are forking over $110.00 (£75) to $221.00 (£150) of their parents money. The research also showed that about 70 percent of the UK children know where their parents go shopping online and a further 20 percent know all the usernames and password their parents use.

Parents are in the dark when it comes to their kids behaviour as only 2 percent think their children would make online purchases without their permission and only six percent admitted their kids have access to their credit card details. However, with 44 percent of parents book-marking their favourite online shopping sites and a third saving their bank card details online, they’re making it very easy for their children to buy online without their knowledge.

- Carrie-Ann Skinner PCWorld

I ever caught a kid of mine pulling this kind of crap I would help the police arrest them for theft, then make them work off every cent they stole from me.

ID Thieves Target LifeLock CEO

JR — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:22:44 +0000

In awesome irony news today, newly uncovered documents show the commercial pitchman who’s made a name for himself by daring crooks to steal his identity has had his identity stolen.

LifeLock CEO Todd Davis is the genius who drove around major cities with his social security number plastered from a truck and blaring from a megaphone. He was evidently so sure his company’s identity protection worked, he didn’t mind readily giving out his personal info as a challenge.

Turns out someone stepped up to the plate and won. An attorney found at least 20 instances of people applying for and sometimes receiving driver’s licenses in Davis’s name. In one case, a man from Texas got $500 from a loan company on Davis’s credit line.

Davis himself admits he didn’t learn about the breach until the company called him to collect the loan back. He also admitted to the Associated Press that it’s entirely possible other people have driver’s licenses issued in his name. Davis told the AP that’s only because of the “flimsy mechanisms” used for reporting that kind of fraud — the same kind of “flimsy mechanisms” his company supposedly uses to protect your personal information.

The revelation has led to a string of lawsuits across the U.S. from customers who say Davis knew his service didn’t offer the protection he claimed it would. Davis, however, still insists his company’s methods work.

“There’s nothing to indicate my identity has been successfully compromised other than the one instance,” he told the AP.

“If anyone can find any other potentially embarrassing or business-killing facts about me, I dare them to publicize them,” he probably thought about adding.