Sneaky ID thieves always one step ahead in schemes By Tom Mashberg/ Exclusive
First of three parts
Peter Kochansky knew he hadn't bought a Porsche, but there it was among his bills - a luxury car loan in his name for $40,000.
That wasn't the half of it. As Kochansky, a lawyer from Somerville, soon learned, a notorious identity thief was racing around the country, running up credit charges and emptying bank accounts, all in Kochansky's name.
The thief, Shawn Pelley, now in federal prison, always seemed a step ahead. When Kochansky canceled his credit cards, Pelley stole $7,000 from a Fleet account Kochansky shared with his wife, even though Pelley had no PIN number.
By Thomas Caywood and Tom Mashberg
Second in a three-part series on identity fraud. Identity theft ain't rocket science. Trust us.
To test the retail credit industry's claims of tough new ID fraud protections, two Herald reporters swapped Social Security numbers and set out to steal each other's identities.
Despite our lack of criminal expertise, within hours we had a $10,000 credit line at one store and a $1,300 account at another.
The experiment began at Dana Ross Studios in the South End, where $60 buys a convincing-looking 'Massachusetts identification card' - complete with digital signature, holograms and a faux magnetic strip along the back.
No questions asked. Cash only. We walked out with two fake IDs in 10 minutes. The cards showed one reporter's face and the other's name, Social Security number, address and age.
Shawn Pelley didn't like who he was, so he became almost anyone else.
Starting in 2001, the crafty Cape Cod native used ID theft to take individuals, banks and retailers for $550,000. Loot and phony identities in hand, he led a flamboyant lifestyle and rubbed elbows with hotshots from L.A. to South Beach.
Pelley, 29, finally was run to ground by U.S. marshals and is serving a 60-month sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. But the skinny, 6-foot high school dropout ran up immense debts in the names of dozens of victims, many of them Massachusetts lawyers.
US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan called Pelley "the most active identity theft perpetrator the major crimes unit has prosecuted."
By Tom Mashberg Monday, April 11, 2005 - Updated: 09:27 AM EST
State Rep. Paul C. Casey is a man of the people -- the people victimized by identity theft.
In 2003, he was one of a half-dozen Paul Caseys across New England defrauded by con artists who used his common name to pilfer gift cards and heaps of merchandise from area retailers.
By Thomas Caywood
Monday, April 11, 2005 - Updated: 03:49 AM EST
Paul K. Casey of Foxboro is the kind of guy who keeps only one or two credit cards and faithfully pays them off each month.
So he knew something was fishy when he got a letter from Sears about the credit application he supposedly filled out at the chain's outlet in Kingston.
Karen Leonard was an Army sergeant in two war zones, then braved the bar exam, but none of it matches having an identity thief run up huge bills in her name.
Not only did crooks steal Bill Loesch's identity, they did the same to his 12-year-old daughter.
Five years ago, Loesch, a protestant minister and Codman Square health activist, rented apartments on the first and third floors of his Dorchester three-decker to tenants he thought he could trust.
Instead, he said, one of them "would get home before me, steal my mail, get credit cards in my name by using my Social Security number and then go on big buying sprees. And this was a woman!"
When the bills came in, the thief would intercept them and rip them up. Years went by before Loesch, 63, realized he'd been ripped off.
The pet sitter did it.
It took a while, but Sandra Pochapin of Southboro figured out how she became an ID fraud victim: The pet sitter went through her mail, pocketed a credit card and hit Lord & Taylor's for $1,200.
"I didn't even know the card was going to arrive," Pochapin, a
48-year-old marketing director, said. "They sent me a card I didn't want for an account that I never used."Since 2002, Pochapin has been trying to undo the damage caused by one person with just one of her credit cards. The thief, who fled the state and was never arrested, opened false accounts from Boston to Brooklyn -- at Macy's, J.C. Penney and Cingular Wireless, and places Pochapin can only imagine.
And recall please, those were the days when they used to print a weekly bulletin 'hot sheet' which they distributed to all the stores, and merchants were expected to check the 'hot sheet' before accepting the card. And there were 'floor limits' which the sales authorizers used to use in those times before sophisticated computers where sales 'under the floor limit' were automatically approved. How long do you think it took the general public -- at least the larcenous members of it -- to figure out the system, and how grocery stores and gasoline stations had one floor limit (almost infinite) while electronics stores, jewelers and liquor stores had another limit (almost none at all). Everyone, but everyone, it seems, tried to rip off First National Bank's BankAmericard program. It took several years of that kind of fraud before FNB-Chicago woke up and decided to (a) try and do at least a modicum of investigation before issuing cards to 'customers' and (b) to at least be a bit discreet in mailing out the damn things.
Even the dishonest employees at the Post Office got in on the act. By simply holding an envelope in their fingers and running their thumb back and forth once or twice (and noting the return address being a suspicious PO Box the bank finally started using to disguise the contents of the mailing) postal workers made off with so many credit cards it would have shocked any hardened con-man. Millions and millions of dollars in fraud in the first few years of widespread VISA/MC use by the public. Maybe its worse now-days, with a more sophisticated public and a somewhat more sophisticated banking system. Is it? Anyone know? PAT]