Another e-mail scam where people ask for money. Are we that dumb? This time the sender is supposedly “Bradon Curtis”, an American “Special Forces Commando” who wants to share some Taliban drug money with you but needs a bit of cash for the shipping. How nice for Memorial Day weekend. Here’s part of the text:

“We will thus send you the shipment waybill, so that you can help claim this luggage on behalf of me and my colleagues. Needless to say the trust (placed) in you at this junction is enormous. We are willing to offer you an agreeable percentage of (these) funds.”

The “Nigerian e-mail” scam is over ten years old and has possibly cost the victims hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s no way to tell, really, because many people are too embarrased to call the authorities once they realize they’ve been had. Read a typical e-mail and see if you’d fall for their tactics. I received one of these emails last week, so it’s clear this scam is still going on.

Anyway…

It looks like part of this ring of scam artists and drug dealers have been caught in South Africa by local police and detectives from the UK’s Scotland Yard. Hopefully they can lock these boys up and keep them away from computers and fax machines for a few years.

Thieves are unbelievable. If only they’d apply their talents to something worthwhile. In this case, they got their hands on a Ford Motor Credit authorization code for Experian, one of the major credit bureaus. This allowed them to make requests for people’s credit reports directly from Experian, just like they were a Ford dealership.

This may affect you, even if you’ve never owned or financed a car from Ford. The reports were pulled from the general population, not just from Ford customers. I’ve read elsewhere that they even targeted affluent neighborhoods, just to victimize people with bigger credit lines. If you were one of the victims, however, you should have received a letter from Ford. They’ve also set up a toll-free line just for this issue - 888-838-8176.

We’ve tried to help you be smart about what you carry in your wallet, but here’s another reminder. If you’re wallet were lost, what would you do? Who would you need to call? Whatever you decide, you better do it fast. Identity thieves know that they have to beat you to the punch if they’re going to get any value from your lost credit card or social security card.

“You’re in trouble if those documents fall into the hands of criminals,” said Diane Terry, director of the fraud victim assistance department at the TransUnion credit agency in Fullerton, Calif. “They act quickly, so you have to, too.” Much better to keep the good stuff (SSN, PINs, etc.) out of your wallet in the first place.

The U.S. government seems to be finally paying attention to identity theft. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General and Senator Diane Feinstein of California held a press conference pushing for Congress to pass legislation that would increase the punishment for identity theft offenders. The pending legislation would increase prison time for convicted offenders and make it a crime to be in possession of someone else’s ID info with the intent to commit a felony.

How are thieves punished today? The median time served in prison for people convicted of identity theft in 2001 was:
- 13 months for cases investigated by the Secret Service
- 7 months for cases handled by the FBI.
- About a third of those convicted were not sent to prison.