 Identity theft. Got a brand new book out on this, here you go. Please come by it, guys. In any case, identity theft now has become the hot crime because as more and more of our personal particulars get into kind of different databases, and I'll talk about that, a person's identity is only what the computer says it is. And it's now become very profitable to steal somebody's identity. We might wonder, why might you want to steal somebody's identity? Well, of course, the big obvious thing is, well, I can use their identity to reap financial benefits by getting credit cards and bank accounts and whatever. But there are other reasons you might want to steal a person's identity. Maybe you're somebody who, when they went to college the first time, didn't take it seriously and, you know, they thunked out and whatever. And, you know, hey, a lot of you guys here basically, I always say, if you come to DEF CON, most of you guys could have PhDs in computer science or computer engineering. Well, maybe you don't want to go to school for eight years to get a PhD. So maybe you steal the identity of somebody who has a PhD in computer engineering, so you can then go get the hundred K in your job. You know, this is another reason you do it. Or maybe you just screwed things up, bounced a lot of checks, got kicked out of apartments, you know, during the Wadi Hadi days. And now you can't even rent an apartment or open a checking account. Well, that's another reason you can steal somebody's identity because then you can become that person so you can live a decent life. In a way, the powers that we, meaning those who insist upon cataloging our personal identifiers in data banks and then using that data to deny or give us certain services, they're the ones to blame for the growth in identities of. Ten years ago, it didn't matter if you had a bank account because of bounced checks, you could open a new one. If you've tried that lately, you'll find out it's virtually impossible because of check services like check system, power check. There's a bunch of them, but they all do the same thing. And you can even be entered into those services, not even if you've crossed a bank any money, but they just didn't like the way you handled your account. So the thing of it is, is that this is where identity theft has grown because basically the computer age has made it difficult for Americans to get that proverbial fresh start. Something that this country was based on. You screw that back just to head it out west. Maybe that's why death cons in Las Vegas, I don't know, and not in New York, or Atlantic City. And I will out west. You can start over out here. In any case, I met a guy in the United Kingdom who, because he was a professional identity thief, ever or twice in the United States. And he comes here for about six weeks and goes home about $40,000 to $50,000 richer. And I'm like, hey, how do you do this? Well, he agreed to talk to me, but I didn't reveal who he was. So we're going to talk about exactly how he does it, and he does almost all of it via the Internet. And I am going to play his role in doing this. Step one, you want to take somebody's identity. You've got to find somebody whose identity is of value to you. What does that mean? It means that you probably don't want to take a whino's identity, or take the identity of Rafael Rezendes Ramirez. He's wanted for all these murders right in the veils. I've been stealing his identity as a sure way to have a lot of trouble. Basically, you want to take the identity of the people that are your parents, the people who go to work every day, live in the suburban home, that kind of stuff. Those are the kind of people whose identities that you want to take because they generally tend to have a lot of problems. They have good credit issues and a stable employment background and personal background. So step one is you have to define who the category of victim is that you want. And so we define that. We want people who basically are professionals with good earning potential, who have stable lifestyles, who aren't going to be on Jerry Swinger. The people you see on Jerry Spring put it that way. Anybody on Jerry Swinger might be okay. So step two, how in the hell do we find these people? It's not like they're all about saying, hey, come here, steal my identity. It may not seem like that, but they're almost doing that. Let's look at one class of people's identities you might want to take. A doctor. Hey, you can go to the ANA database on the web and you can get the educational background from the practice address of almost every licensed physician in this country. That's a place to start. Or maybe, you know, medicine isn't your thing. I mean, it's kind of hard to say, yeah, I'm, you know, Joseph Jones, N.D., and you don't know, I don't know where the appendix is, you know, and everything. So maybe you decide, you know, the people who work in academia, that's a pretty good place to start. And you know why it's a good place to start? Because every college publishes a college catalog. So I decided, okay, I'm going to follow this guy's step. I mean, I always had a nice thing for Colorado. I lived there for a few years as a kid. You know, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs is a really good electrical engineering computer science program. So let's see if there's somebody there who I might like to become. So what do I do? I go through the faculty listing, which of course you can do right online. Now, see some names up here. Now, first of all, if the guy has a name like Smith or Johnson, we don't want to mess with that because when we have to go through the next step of getting the personal identifiers, there might be hundreds of them that we have to sift through. So we want to find somebody who meets our criteria but has a relatively unique or different name, okay? John Newman might not be the guy to go looking for it because there might be a lot of Newman's in the phone book. And if you live in Los Angeles, somebody with the last name of Alvarez might not be the place to start. So you know, use some sense here. Okay, well, I look through here and it's like, hey, wait a minute. Down toward the bottom, I see a number of good candidates. But I kind of like this guy here, Gerald Olasek. And I think that that looks like a good place to start. Now, isn't this wonderful? I know it's a little out of focus here, but if you notice, it tells me that he has, where he got his education, B.S. in Wayne State, Master's in Ph.D., C.R.K. C. University. So now I start building a phone. Not only now do I have this man's full name, but I also have this background. I know where he got his undergraduate degree, his graduate degrees. I also have his work telephone number, his work email. So now I start creating either on a separate screen on my computer or the old-fashioned one with pen and paper. I start making up a list of this man's identifiers. First thing is the name. I've got his work telephone number. I have his educational background. So now I'm well on my way, taking this man's identity over, and he doesn't have a clue about it. Okay. Now, we don't necessarily just have to do things like with soccer numbers. The point I'm making here is anybody who works on a licensed professional works where a director is published of people who work at a particular company in certain functions. If you can get a hold of that information, which now, many times, is posted on the Internet, you now have that first kernel of data that you need to take this person's identity over. So that's where we begin. Now, you can say, but wait a minute, John, that's not enough. Your course is not enough, but we're not finished yet. The next step is we're going to try to find out this man's address and home phone. The reason we need that is because once I've got that, I can then get all of his other records. So what did I do? I go to AI. Look, I use AOL. Like I told you, I haven't been around long. Okay. Okay. But I go to AOL's search page, and guess what? I went to search for a Gerald Olizek in Colorado Springs, and I know there's only going to be one. And guess what? One-of-one match, Gerald and Olizek 15-pin Big Valley Drive, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 809.09, and there's his home phone number. Boom. I am into this guy. Now, let me stop and give you the disclaimer. I always give you. You know I believe in the First Amendment. That's why I don't come up here and read back out his address or whatever. This guy is just a working guy. He's a professor. He's not a bad guy or whatever. But I can't come up here and say, I believe in free information and then censor what I give to you guys. I've never censored anything I've presented to you guys. All I ask is, don't screw this guy over. Okay. Don't go steal his identity. You guys don't need to. He's an okay guy. If he was a joke, I'd be the first guy to say, go for it. But don't. Okay. I trust you guys here. Don't use your judgment. Okay. So now I have got the next set of identifiers I need. What all do I know about Mr. Olizette? I know his name. I know his home address. I know his work phone and address. I know his educational background for undergraduate and graduate studies. And I have his home telephone number. So what do I need to do now? Now I need to start getting those all two critical, miracle identifiers about this man. One, the social security number. And two, his birthday. That isn't that hard to do. When I got the name and address of an individual, if any time in the last 10 years he has got a credit report pulled on him at that address, I can go and get his social security number. This search goes by a number of names. It can be called either a social security lookup search or a national identifier search or an unknown address search. Now, can I do this legally? Yes. As I mentioned to you guys when I spoke to you three years ago, back in 1989 the Bishop administration, head of the Federal Trade Commission, he voted all of our privacy by saying, from now on the only part of your credit report that has any privacy protection is the actual payment history. Everything else on your credit report, your name, your birth date, your address, your former address, your social security number, where you work, all of that is considered to be public record. And this information, although the bills, the three credit bills themselves do not sell it directly to the public, you can access it by using an information broker. There are many information brokers on the internet. One of them is DocuSearch, another one is American Information Network. They also go by the name the Internet Department of Motor Vehicles. Anyone can pay these services between $20 and $50 and run this search to get a social security number on a person if you have the person's name and an address that's 10 years, at least, they've lived that in the last 10 years and they've had any type of credit report activity done on. That's the next step. You can do that over the internet, pay the credit card, and the beauty is a header search does not leave any trace on the individual's credit report that it was done. So even later on, after this guy's identity has been ripped off and he's reported it to the police and done all of that stuff, there will be no trace that you actually kill this man's header data to let the any trace of it whatsoever. And if you want more anonymity or many information brokers, you can set up a cash account and run your searches that way and they just deduct it. You could do that in any name that you want to. But the point of the deal is header searches do not leave any notation in the inquiries section of the credit report that they will run. So you can be invading this man's deepest privacy and he'll have no idea that it's done, but also remember that's how somebody can do it to you and I. So you run this search, you're going to get back his social security number. Many times you'll also get back his current address, his two previous addresses, and you'll get some imperial information. Well, now you're barely cooking with gas because he pretty much got the identifiers that you need to take him over. But you don't want to move just yet because part of my British friend's modus operandi is that he wants to go and max this guy's credit out over a short few week period. So the next search he runs is what's called a creditor search. Not many people know about this, but you realize that the actual listing of creditors that you have is not privacy protected. In other words, if you have a Bank of America Visa card account with a $700 balance and a $2,000 limit, your payment history on that account is privacy protected. And the account number is. But the fact that you have that account with Bank of America Visa is not privacy protected. So we now go back to our information broker and we run a list of creditors search. So then we'll get back all of the places that he has credit history. Why is that important? Because we don't want to apply for a card at a bank that he already has an outstanding credit card with. So now what do we know about Mr. Orizek? We know his name. We know his birth date. We know his social security number. We know his home address, his home telephone number, his work address, his work telephone number, his previous addresses, and maybe even his previous employer. And we know who he owes money to. What don't we know about this guy? That's the question. And we've done it all sitting at a computer screen halfway around the world from his little hatch in Colorado Springs. So we are now ready to enter phase two. We have all the information that we need now to take over his identity. The next step is to become him. Well, part one of phase two involves, before we leave for the United States or shortly after we leave for the U.S., we arrive in the United States. The first thing that we need to do is get some identification in Mr. Orizek's name. Well, guess what? I am now Gerald M. Orizek. And you know what? That's a damn good-looking Colorado ID card. Okay? Damn good-looking. I'll tell you something. You can go up in a bank account with this, rent an apartment with this, get credit cards with this. This is the best quality fake ID you can buy. So that's the step part one of step two, is we get a high-quality fake ID in the name of the identity staff victim. Of course, this card came from our friends at theidshop.com. And like I told you, with the place makes good stuff, I'm right there to tell you, this is the very best that you can get. They will be having smart chips, because some of the new IDs will have smart chips in a couple of years. They'll be doing that. They'll do the holographic laminates and the ultraviolet markings. They're not doing those things here, but if you buy a card, you can send it to them and they'll add it. The point is, with this ID and his name, I now have the ability to be him. So what's my next step? Well, next step is I've got to get an address on this man, so that I can now begin to clean his clock out. Well, with this ID, I go to an apartment complex, maybe in Colorado Springs, maybe nearby in Pueblo, or Denver, or someplace in between, and I say, yeah, I'd like to rent an apartment. And the woman will say, well, here's the tenancy agreement and the all-important application to rent. Guess what? She's going to ask for some ID. Well, I've got the ID. When I fill out the application to rent, the information on that application is collected so that the owner of the apartment complex can run a credit check on me. That's why they have you fill that up. Thirty years ago, that's not how it worked, but that's how it works now. So I put the address of my new apartment that I want to live in on my application to rent. They then go and run my credit history at one of the bureaus, or sometimes at two, or sometimes even three. Guess what happens? Two things happen. Number one, I now get approved to rent this apartment, which means I now have a mailing address that won't flag on a computer system that it's not a residential address. And number two, I have now changed the address on Ms. Mann's credit report to the address of my new apartment as Gerald M. Oasek. That'll become very important later on. So now I've got an address. Now, my British friend, he never actually even moves in the apartment because he doesn't want to leave any evidence later on. The point is, he now's got a legit address. So what do we do next? Well, next is what's called the build-up. The next thing we do is we know where he has credit. So then we go and we say, where can we get credit the easiest? Well, we know if a bank is offering a 7.9% of these a card, they're gonna have a much more stringent credit qualification process than one that charges 18 or 19%. So our friend has done his research once again via the lovely internet to find out who offers high-rate cards. And guess what? That's where he makes his applications. And the high-rate card issuers are gonna issue him because they're gonna pull this guy's credit report and go, well, damn, I don't know why he wants our card, but hey, if he wants to pay 19 or 20%, sure, we'll send it to him with a huge limit. Okay? That's what he does. So he knows the higher the interest rate, the more owners to fees, the easier the application process. So over a short period of time, he will lodge 15 or 20 credit applications. But wait a minute, he does something else, too. There's three bureaus. Generally, if you have three inquiries within a short period of time, once you get that third inquiry, you won't be able to get any more credit. So he makes sure he knows what bureau each particular credit card company pulls from. How does he find this out? He just asks him. They'll tell you. It's no big secret. Half of the key to getting sensitive information that you want, a lot of times is picking up the telephone and speaking in a nice voice and saying, yeah, I'm good having some credit problems. I need to know what bureau you pull off of. You know, a little social engineering. If the guy doesn't want to tell you, say, well, look, I think I've been the victim of credit fraud, so I need to know because I need to make sure that my bureau is okay. I'll tell you right away the person will go, oh, sure, we use trans union. Don't worry. We use Experian. That was the old TRW. Oh, don't worry. We use, you know, whatever. They'll tell you without any difficulty. Social engineering is the key part. Sometimes when you're building this dossier, you might have trouble sometimes getting a whole birthday. That'll happen frequently because a credit report won't have a whole birthday. If that happens because you need the birthday, what can you do? It's real simple. You call Gerald and Alizek. You call him up and say, hi, my name's Jeffrey Jones. I work at the American Physics Society. And we're updating our faculty list. And I'd like to know now, are you still teaching at UCCS? Are your interests still plasma physics and artificial intelligence, blah, blah, blah, blah? He goes, yeah. He says, okay, now, where'd you go to college at because we've got BS from here and you master's from here and is your birth date still, is your birth date such and such? And he goes, oh, no, no, it's actually whatever. Boom, you got the birth date. And then you tell him something like, look, we'll send you a copy of the entry that we're going to put in our new directory of American physicists in a couple of weeks. When you get it, simply initial it if everything's okay and send it back. That'll put them totally at ease because everybody likes to be stroked, okay? You know, some big agent from William Lewis calls me. You know, he says blah, blah, blah. I'm at the parliament every once. Social engineering works on other people. It also works on us, okay? The point is generally, like I said, sometimes you have trouble getting that whole birth date, but if you do, it's very easy to get that. And professional people are used to being asked these kind of questions. The other thing is they're various directories like the National Faculty Directory that will a lot of times have the birth dates of everybody that's in it. For your information, National Faculty Directory, it's a huge set of three or four volumes that lists the faculty member of every accredited college of higher learning in the United States and Canada. Generally, the entry will have the person's full name, their birth date, their department, all of that kind of stuff. And it's available at most libraries. I don't know if it's online yet, but most university libraries will have a copy of it. In any case, so, now we've got the apartment in this guy's name. And we now know we'll want to apply for credit. So the next step is to apply for credit. But you want to do it all rapidly because you want all of these applications to go in. So who makes a stack? Three credit card applications that clear through Experian, three that clear through TransUnion, and gosh, what's that other bureau? I forget right now. It's right up here, but I can't remember. Yeah, three thank you, three from our good friends at Equifax, three that clear through Equifax. Okay, so he fills all of these out. He mails them all out all at once. Well, of course, they've all got the address of his apartment. Now, odds are a couple of three of them will get declined because the address on the other bureaus might not have been changed yet. But most of the others will actually probably go through because by the time you're processed, that new address will show up on the credit bureau. Okay, so a few weeks later he's going to get a fist full of cards. Now, whilst he's waiting for those, he goes out and gets instant credit. Best buy charges something like 22%. You know why? That's why they give you instant credit in the store because they charge so much in interest. So he walks into places like Best Buy or Circuit City or whatever and applies for their store cards. He gets them. And then, of course, he goes and buys whatever he wants to buy later on. The point is, in a short period of time he will have amassed a massive ability to access money. But he's not quite ready yet. The next thing is to open a bank account. Well, that's really easy to do. Once again, I have to tell you our friends at theidshop.com offer the very best who walks into a bank with Pikes Peak Savings Bank. He says, yeah, I'd like to open a Checking and Savings account. And they might say, would you like overdraft protection? And of course, he says, yes, I would because, you know, that means they're going to run a credit report. So he opens his account. They check with Telecheck. They go to a bank with a new checkbook, maybe overdraft protection of $1,000 on his new account. But most importantly, he now has a place to put the proceeds of the next step of the plan. Step three is what we call the bust out. The bust out is, now we've got a stack of credit cards. We have a stack of instant credit and we've got a new bank account. So we want to now go and max this stuff out and turn it into cash as rapidly as possible. Well, most credit cards come with convenience checks. We've got a bank account now. So we fill out those convenience checks for as much as possible to move that money into that bank account. So we fill those out. And the thing is, that looks better to a bank. For example, they send you a Visa card with an $8,000 limit. It looks bad if you go to a bank five days in a row and take a $500 cash advance out of an ATM or at the color window. It looks better if you just write one of those convenience checks for $3,000. That's a process without any problem. So over the next couple of weeks he writes convenience checks against the cash advance limit or in some cases the entire credit limit of the card he set up. The reason he does this concurrently is because remember at the end of the month all of those creditors are going to report to the Bureau to hide the balance on those accounts. If all of a sudden all of those accounts show up with a huge balance that's going to set off a warning bell. But by the time that happens our buddy is long gone. So he writes the convenience checks, puts them in, checks clear pretty quickly now. Generally within four business days the funds will actually have gone from the credit card company into the account. Then for the stuff that he can't use he buys items that he might want a computer, television, VCR, whatever else he wants that kind of stuff. Then a week later he goes to the bank he takes his money out that he wants he closes this is the bust out takes the cash out in the form of you know he either takes cash out then goes and buys money orders somewhere else whatever else but the point is when he's done he has now converted all of that credit into cash in a way that can't really be traced. Now what happens? Generally everything will go just Ladies and gentlemen we have some 60 days later because none of these players have been paid he's going to start getting phone calls and he's not going to know a damn thing about it. Well by the time he puts it all together our fund has moved on. But guess where our fund goes next? He goes to another city in the United States and does the same thing. He does three or four U.S. cities the same way. Now because he uses different creditors and they're in different cities whatever the funds never really get involved because you see the thing of it is a secret service generally only gets involved. Secret service is the lead agency for this type of crime. But in general they only get involved if the individual losses very very substantial like over $15,000 or $20,000 to one creditor and also if it seems to be part of an organized ring. But the problem is nobody realizes that for a very very long time because initially it just seems somebody got a hold of your account number and whatever. It doesn't seem like oh wait a minute this is a big operation that's underway. And so by the time that the feds might actually get involved the smart identity thief like this guy has moved way on. But in general what happens is the card companies have a profit loss guideline that's why there's annual fees to bounce check fees. If any of you have bounced a check lately to a credit card company you know it's very expensive now. Some are charging $29. You're one day late with your payment $29. What do you think all those fees are so high? Because they said okay credit card lending is the single most profitable item banks and financial institutions do. But it's also vulnerable to being penetrated by fraud. So all they've simply done was increase the cost to us in terms of those fees to cover what they lose. So many times the bank is not all that concerned because as long as their loss is for the year they'll exceed what they expect to lose then they're not too concerned about it. Now there was a guy in New York a Nigerian and they called him the Duke of New York. He did about $8 million in credit card fraud this way. It said he even bought a Mercedes automobile and shipped it back to Africa this way. They took him down because he was doing so much so rapidly it was obvious this is an organized operation that's going on and the banks were hit hard again and again and again and again over a short period of time which took them out of their profit loss guidelines which means they then want to go after the person and once in a while they decide they want to make an example of someone but the general thing of it is here and this is what my British friend has learned is that this is a crime that if you strike hard and know how to strike and move on that you can do this and make you know he probably makes $200 grand a year doing this Why can you do this? Because America is the only industrialized democracy that allows this wholesale trafficking and personal identifiers Credit rules will tell you we couldn't have our files without social security numbers that's bullshit. In Canada when you apply for credit now providing your social insurance number is optional because there was so much bitching in Canada about the fact that SINs the Canadian equivalent of our social security number could be used to uniquely identify people and the Canadian government insisted that the Canadian credit bureaus come up with a file retrieval system that did not depend on social insurance numbers in the United Kingdom and Holland they do not use their equivalent of RSS number to pull credit reports so you do not have to use social security numbers as a file indexing tool it's absolute bullshit the reason the credit bureaus like it one, it's a very handy and unique identifier because in theory each person's number belongs only to them and number two it allows them if they need to to access many other databases that contain information about you the other problem that makes us all vulnerable to identity theft is the fact that so many other reasons that have nothing to do with social security use this number many states such as Hawaii the driver's license number is a social security number many states that even if they don't use the SS number as the license number they still take it and put it into their database a few states don't one of them is Washington state but most states do either if they don't put the number on the card they request it when you apply for the card what in the hell does social security when I retire have to do with me driving a car the answer has absolutely nothing to do with it but what it is is the government wanted to create a national identifier but they knew the American people would never stand for it if they tried to do it above board do you remember in the old days the little white social security cards had a disclaimer at the bottom and with the bad disclaimer said not for identification purposes if you've gotten a social security card anytime in the last 15 years it doesn't say that anymore but your parent's card does why because the government decided wait a minute this is a way to create that national identity card why you states ask for it for driver's licenses the only real purposes of social security is one when the employer needs it because they're paying SS benefits two it's on your tax return to uniquely identify it because a lot of people do have the same first middle and last name and birthday and for tax purposes you can argue it should be on the return but beyond that there is no real reason that social security members need to be commonly used as an identification tool in this country and this has been pulled on the American people without any sort of public debate it was done by bureaucratic fiat and never had to happen one of the reasons it's happened because when people ask for something on a form we as sheep say sure cable company wants the SS number sure the bank wants it sure they ask for it we're provided nobody said wait a minute why do you need my SS number to hook me up for cable TV or to give me electricity why do you need it but we gave it anyway so what happened was once they got used to collecting it then they kept on collecting it and things like the privacy act of 75 don't specifically prohibit them from collecting it they say that they have no right necessary to ask for it but it also says they don't have to give you service if you don't provide it so that's how we've gotten into this phase now I've got a book on this called identity theft a cyber crime or a millennium this is a detailed look even more so in various ways people steal someone else's identity identity the various types of identity theft because not every identity theft is the same some like our friend from the United Kingdom are people that want to go to impact your identity and ruin your financial rate there are other people who take your identity and live under it for many many years and that can be even worse because if somebody takes your identity and father's children and then doesn't pay child support then all of a sudden the government comes and garnishes your wage to pay for somebody else's children but you say but they're not my children but he says no wait a minute is your name Gerald Olazek yes is your birth date such as yes is your social security yes well they're your kids but wait now I'm black those kids are white it doesn't matter okay yeah in fact hey you guys lack let me pay something in Los Angeles County right home of the OJ Simpson trial and many other interesting modern day occurrences they have the absolute worth child support enforcement unit they will go after somebody even if they know the person is not the father of these children because what they do if your identifiers just happen to match the person they're looking for they'll send you a summons to appear in court God forbid if you don't show up in court because if you don't they'll get a default judgment for that child support and then they come after you even later if you go to them and say wait a minute I'm not this kid's father I can document I was in ten bucks to you when little Johnny was born they'll still say no no we have the court order you're paying the child support for these people many of them who are poor and that's why they can't show up for their court hearing or the summons goes to a wrong address they'll insist that these people still pay and if they can't get a lawyer you have men and some women who pay child support because of this for years for kids they don't know because they can't get out of the system a lot of assistant district attorneys in LA County have resigned over this policy of theirs so you see this isn't just an academic issue the problem is as our personal identifiers get loaded into more and more databases and there's almost no regulation of the sale transfer and exchange of personal information the opportunity for our identities to be stolen or for us to fall victim to somebody else's malfeasance increases the worst thing that can happen in identity so let me tell you about there was a motor vehicle court named Man Farnel up in Washington State I love Washington, that's where Lynn Panix is beautiful state but they got a problem at the DMV or they did women would come in to get driver's licenses and she would notice if a woman just met her general similarities same eye color, hair color same general build, of course the same race then she'd make a duplicate of that individual's license then she would go out and open checking accounts and whatever and the victim's names well she would write big checks like for thousands of dollars for jewelry whatever else because until the checks start bouncing all those places are going to approve the checks so the checks bounce they then go after the real woman who she victimized they arrested her but the woman says wait a minute I'm not this woman well they do a line up the woman who saw her for maybe three minutes writing a check said yeah that looks like her you think about it if I give you a check you know you see me for a couple of minutes two days two weeks later if you can do a line up you might pick any blackmail that meets my general outline and say oh yeah that's the person who gave me the check because there's not a lot of in depth identification of this person so when the police when the woman identified her in the line up the cop said oh you're guilty the woman was convicted of the felony check for a jury because this was big money we're talking fifteen twenty thousand dollars because she bought jewelry, expensive furniture all sorts of other stuff she was convicted she was waiting to be sent to the russian state penitentiary for women when finally man farnell struck again same modus operandi same bit then the detective was oh my god I put the victim in jail the real woman is still out there well it does have a happy ending of sorts now of course the victim now can't use her own name she has a criminal record she has to carry a copy of a police report with her all that stuff but they did catch up with man farnell last year in mexico okay now she's back home in washington I think she got three to five years but I'm wondering what's she gonna do when she gets out because I mean does she have some identities we don't know about but she's squared away the point of it is this all happens because the number of databases with personal information continues to grow did you know there is now a new database called the national new hire database and this is a perfect example of how our privacy gets destroyed in a massive way to accomplish what seems to be a societally useful goal we all know there's a problem with parents who don't pay child support first one to agree with you kids deserve their child support so the government said well wait a minute how can we catch all of these child support scoff laws so they said I know everybody's gotta work to eat right so let's create a database of every person that either changes jobs or is rehired in that database we'll call the national new hire database and in that database we will have the name, the birth date the social security number the sex and race and some other identifiers at very state to state of every person who works when you change a job your employer through his payroll filings will send this information to the federal government and then they will run this against a master list of child support scoff laws in all 50 states so once again your data is now making another trip into another database because we decided to catch the relatively few people who don't live up to their obligations we're going to take everybody's privacy and throw it down the trash can and that's exactly what they're doing this also means that some clerk who has access to their debt ends a lot of people because it's an employer who files it it's the various contractors that compile the databases for each state and the people that forward it on to the federal government so a lot of people that can stick their fingers in and get a hold of your name and number and that increases a chance of somebody committing identity theft then there's the problem anytime you match millions and millions of names and personal identifiers against the database you inevitably create mismatches it just happens that's one of the reasons the SS number has the long structure it has because many people have the same first name, middle initial, last name and even birthday there may be 150 other people in a country of 270 million that share those same identifiers with you and what happens if one of those guys owes child support you get a new job well all of a sudden your boss tells you hey look John, we gotta let you go because they're going to garnish you away because look you're the person who got that you haven't been supporting for 10 years so goodbye and look you say that it's not you but look the government says it is you so goodbye okay this is the kind of stuff that can happen and does happen now I've got a book coming out in the fall of this year oh well that doesn't look too good there we go Big Brother's secret databases because remember Big Brother he's not just watching you he's taking some notes buddy now okay this book is going to be the first book of its kind where I will inventory and explain to you all of the so called secret databases that the government and the private sector runs for example everybody's heard of NCIC the National Crime Information Center but that's nothing compared to the Treasury Enforcement Computer System gets put into every time you cross a border did you know the Treasury Enforcement Computer System with depending on answers to certain questions can conclude that you fit the profile of a drug smuggler they keep a list of every time you cross the border from Canada and Mexico in your car that gets recorded they can then go check that information years later against motor vehicle registration records to determine hey how many times did John cross the border to Canada in the last 10 years they can create a profile of your foreign travel habits the problem is that's the Treasury Department who else is in the Treasury Department something like IRS they have a database called FEMSEN the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network now FEMSEN is interesting you can go buy $3,000 worth of money orders you can file there's a currency transaction report that gets filed FEMSEN correlates data from banks, currency transaction reports property valuations all sorts of other things to determine if you're somebody that the IRS should be more interested in did you know if you own a car worth more than $60,000 that that's potentially enough to get you to come under the scrutiny of FEMSEN there's all sorts of secret databases there's now what are called excluded persons list that government agencies create like when a fraud happens or whatever the people who are participating in it their names get put on a list of people that can no longer do business with a particular government agency the problem is if your name matches that of somebody who's on there you might find yourself unable to do certain things I also explain how the Interstate Identification Index works that the FBI maintains a criminal record information all over the country how the instant background check when you buy a gun how it actually works that's part one of the book and there's all sorts of databases that I explain part two I set out a plan that you can enact to get your name and number removed out of many of those databases as possible and to lower your profile so that you can have privacy alright look I've gone on enough are there any questions yeah you what can you do to what to prevent it buy this book ok buy my book read it and then take some of the steps like for example one step is don't write personal checks at merchants anymore every time you buy the personal check places like color check and check systems they don't just verify that your check is ok that you're not probably a bad database you know if those guys do this they say hey wait a minute this guy's writing a check he's showing his driver's license so let's capture that data because now we got his license number it's expiration date it's state of issue his bank account number and where and how you spend your money they take that data it goes into their database so then can we sell that to marketing companies and credit card issues they can say I know John Key Newman spends $300 a month with the porno store also I was wondering why am I getting all of those brown envelopes in the mail but that's how because I paid for it by a check hey Jerry Springer paid a sucker with a check you know the point of it is sure that's what these companies do so there's a way to lower your profile it doesn't even gotta live like a helmet and eat wild nuts and berries and all that stuff not at all there's simple practical steps you can take that will give you back most of your personal privacy and like I said it doesn't mean live like a helmet I'm sure you we're discussing your friend through England and the fact that you went to the bank so how does the bank account how does the employee being attached to that get a fingerprint or whatever when they open that kind of account for anything you're sorry you're from the great state of California most places the other thing is you can open bank accounts over the internet I'll open the new bank account over the internet and the thing is you open it over the internet they send you out your signature cards they send you out your ATM card and your checks you can do that all over the internet you you know that's overblown he said what about video surveillance at the bank I mean the thing is you can wear disguises that kind of stuff or the thing is there's one shot of this guy that's not gonna be enough and the thing is that you can grow a beard a huge beard and cut my hair way down and lost 50 pounds you wouldn't recognize me same thing here because the transaction that you're making is only for a short period of time so that those people end up wanting you ma'am how what it's not as hard as you might think in a lot of states she wanted to know how hard is it that someone's mother's maiden name because that sees this password down a lot of things it's not as hard to get as you might think for example I talk about social engineering this guy you could call him up because once you've got all of his information you could call this guy up and say look as a password for your listing can we have your mother's maiden name that way nobody else can make any changes to it he'd be amazed at how most of the time people would buy a rocket in some states most certificates are still public records like California we ordered a long form of the birth certificate we've got the person's mother's maiden name Massachusetts is the same way there are ways of getting it it's not a secure password that's one thing I say never use the last few digits of your SSN as a password and never use your mother's maiden name as a password because both of those things can potentially be accessed you he's asking what countries in the world I think have taken the best steps for protecting personal information privacy most definitely I would say the Netherlands I would certainly say Sweden and actually EU as a whole there's a debate now going on between the European Union and the United States because they're worried that our protection of personal privacy is so lax as you've seen that they are saying I would allow companies in the EU to do data exchange with American companies on personal information until you change the protection of personal data so this is an ongoing debate yeah okay so if you wanted to disappear in a week well first read my book we were born in the USA that'll teach you what you need to know now if you're disappearing because the feds are after you you better read my book the heavy duty new identity you need those two books you'll be able to disappear in a week okay you over there I wonder if you've heard of a data exchange I'm not going to be taking a registry yeah yeah this is one that Pinnitz he's asked have I heard of a database called Indian Registry normal words are trying to compile about potential Pinnitz as they can there's a new registry called UD Registry which stands for unlawful detainer when it actually gets to the point where you stay in the apartment, you haven't paid rent and the landlord goes and files the eviction papers that's known as an unlawful detainer at that point there is now a company that's compiled a database of all of these but you think that's bad but you know there's one company called Avert and they're not the only one that landlords use and I mentioned this in my book how to investigate your friends, enemies and lovers but they will also check a potential future tenant if there are any criminal history on them and if there are any wants and wants on them now I ask you when did landlords get the right to check to see if you have some criminal conviction 10 years ago and to see if you're a wanted person I mean where do we draw the line and landlords say oh we're just doing it to make our community safe but at that point you could say at some point well you're going to have to give fingerprints and a DNA sample I mean where do you draw the line you see this is a problem that I call security via database we're trying to eliminate threats to us as a society by saying all we have to do is keep creating more and more databases that contain the names of more and more people that we consider undesirable so we make a database of pedophiles which is probably a good thing to do then we make a database I don't know of people whose noses are too big or you know people who do whatever but before you know it you can have a hundred databases that everybody has to clear before you can run a car run an apartment whatever the question is where do you draw the line because if we are not careful it is conceivable that 50 years from now to run an apartment you may have to give fingerprints and a DNA sample who would have thought to run an apartment in 1999 that they were checking through three credit bureaus check to see if you have a criminal record check to see if you are a wanted person and check to see if you've ever skipped that on like somewhere else 30 years ago you would have said well that's crazy but we're here with no public debate that's the question that I raise who said we can do this you in the back there why first part let me say what this man said he applied for insurance insurance companies are another big user of the SSN because many insurance companies access the credit history why I don't know because insurance is not a credit contract he asked a guy if he could not disclose his SSN he would use a different number the man told him oh no it's a felony if you don't disclose it that is pure worship my friend nothing under federal law says you must give a private company your SS number you cannot be prosecuted for not providing it now as far as being prosecuted for providing another number that's a gray area if it's simply a mistake and maybe your hand just slipped nobody can say that you are purposefully appropriating somebody else's social security number to get a benefit as a practical matter very few people have ever been prosecuted for the fact that they got insurance but used a different SS number to get it I would not worry about it and in fact if you read some of my books I'll tell you how you can make up SS numbers that are potentially valid but either have not if they have an issue they belong to infants right now who aren't in any insurance or credit system I talk about that I don't recommend that you do it but you have to pay attention to privacy you I think it's definitely possible so the problem is it's a possibility I mean nobody can say how rapidly technology he's asking if it's possible instead of 50 years maybe 10 or 20 years by using urine samples or blood samples that's what we provide to establish identity and certainly it's possible you see these things seem like they're not feasible but because they're done in gradual steps for example the police chief of New York City he said if he could he would take DNA samples from anyone arrested for anything and he says that all people should have their DNA samples entered into a data bank now the problem is the small incremental steps when you take the DNA of sex offenders because you can say there's a useful reason for this because of the nature of the evidence then you go a little bit forward and say well not just sex offenders but anybody who does a violent felony then maybe you move the violent a little forward and say not just a violent felony but any violent crime you see all of a sudden before you know it everybody who's arrested is given a DNA sample one of the proposals is that he says everybody who's born should have to provide a DNA sample well because at first for example when they look for child support at first they want to match name and SSM if they don't match those two then they look for name and birth date and that's how a lot of people can get frosty tagged or if somebody else either writes their SS number down wrong or for example with my SS number three different women decided they would start using it a woman in California in Fonterra, California she uses it because when I pulled my TRW there she is and two women in Colorado they were also using it so I had to get a new SS number because once somebody else has started appropriating it there's not much you could do time is up listen I'm going to be at the lymphatics table when this is over big brothers secret databases will be out in the fall I have a website I have business cards I'm giving away out there if you're interested in topics and you want covered in more detail I urge you to please patronize the lymphatics table and once again if you're in the market for a fake ID I'll tell you this is the very best out here you can get instant satisfaction and like I said you can use this for a lot of purposes not just this so if you're looking for one and maybe want a little privacy maybe want a second identity or a second ID just to have something to show that's not your real name and birthday maybe want to get a second bank account or something right here's a way to do it right here this guy's for real he's legit unfortunately he's leaving tomorrow so if you want one you need to go get one today if the lymphatics is always looking for new writers go to the lymphatics.com website it will tell you the submission guidelines we work with the written way go to the website put together your proposal send it in if you're interested they'll get not to you thank you very much I'll be at the lymphatics table