Making Money with Financial Identities

Here is an example of how fianancial identities are used in scams to make money for the bad guys:
1. Bad Guy Bob buys 2,000 financial identities for $2 apiece. So, here one person makes $4,000 for a product (the financial identities) that he gets to sell over and over again.
2. Bob then uses one of the identities to get a credit account at Circuit City where he buys 10 digital cameras for $500 each. This charge of course is against someone else, not Bob.
3. Bob has the cameras shipped to one of his re-mailers. He got the re-mailer by posting an advertisement on a telephone pole saying, "Work at home, make $20 per hour."
4. Bob opens a store on eBay advertising brand new, still under warranty cameras, still in the packaging, for sale for only $350. Bob will get a lot of orders for these cameras.
5. Bob sends ten of the orders to his re-mailer and says, " Open the box from Circuit City and send one camera for each of these orders. Bob pays the re-mailer, say, $40 for this work.

Let's do the math. Bob make $3,500 for his $2 investment when he used one of the 2,000 financial identities he had purchased earlier. If he does this same routine 1,999 more times he will gross $700,000. By the way, Bob could execute this entire scam from outside of the U.S. He could also move the operation (the re-mailers and the Circuit City store) from city to city each month.

This scam is a very difficult one to catch up with. It is very lucrative and very low risk. The point of all of this is that with such easy gain and low risk, there is a high level of motivation for bad guys to steal identities. You can bet that the pressure on financial identities will increase for many years to come.