Wouldn't it be interesting to have access to this kind of identity service? Vigilant teller unmasks major identity theft ring.
A PERSONAL cheque for $976, produced by a smiling woman at the ANZ bank's Miranda branch on April 26, seemed in order - with one exception.
Claiming to be Gianna Swadling, the woman did not know the teller was a friend of the real owner of the account. When challenged, Ms Swadling's impostor fled.
[...] By May almost $10 million had been stolen by people using seemingly real identification documents to open new accounts, obtain credit cards and loans, or access the funds of legitimate holders.
The fake identifications included stolen Australian passports with photos of the true owners replaced with pictures of those adopting their identities, complete with duplicate Australian Government holograms.
The alleged fraudsters even produced NSW drivers licences, complete with waratah holograms and manufactured in Indonesia and Bangladesh, along with Medicare cards and bogus electricity or water-rate bills to create fake accounts, or shadow accounts of real companies...
To be fair, the teller was not "vigilant", she knew the chequebook owner personally and, if she hadn't, they would have got away with it again. Her vigilance amounted to, "Gianna Swadling? In your dreams sister."
What interests me most about this is that, while we are worrying about online theft of identities, doing it in the real world is getting easier because the very technologies that authorities get their panties in a bunch about are being applied to falsifying the very tools they most trust; documents.
What the teller did have, however, was access to more information than the crooks could possibly falsify and through an alternative channel. The problem with documentary evidence of that kind is that it all flows through the same, suspect, channel; the person who may be committing the fraud.
But my bank holds my photo and a picture of my signature, it is embedded in my credit card, they have my cellphone they could call, an identity server could haul in all that other stuff from around the net, photos especially, and if I gave it permission, my Plazes account, Plaxo data, stuff stuff from ClaimID and so forth.
The more fragmented is my identity, the more places a fraudster has to go to falsify me and the higher the cost of stealing me. But using this technology, the easier it is to reassemble that fragmented persona and compare it with the person in front of me holding a sheaf of purported ID.
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