A few months ago, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore had his credit card denied while he was traveling in Santa Fe, N.M. He made a phone call to the bank.
“Now,” came the voice on the other end of the line, “were you in Panama this morning?”
Gore suspects someone in the restaurant he had visited the previous evening copied his card number and sold it. The buyer, apparently in Central America, placed a modest charge on the card — $80 — to test his new acquisition. It was the second time in his life that his identity had been stolen. The first had been when he was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and required a lot of work to repair.
Some say that property crimes are not as serious as violent crimes, since there is “really no victim,” Gore said. “Well, I don’t agree with that.”
“It really wreaks havoc on a person’s life,” said Bonnie Dumanis, San Diego County’s district attorney. “It’s not necessarily the use of violence that can devastate people now, and I think we’re getting to see that.”
Dumanis and Gore, two of the county’s top law enforcement officials, spoke recently with the San Diego Business Journal about fraud and other economic crimes.
Old Crimes, New Technology
In many ways, new crimes aren’t that new, Gore said — they are just committed with new technology.
The son of a San Diego police officer, Gore recalled his father talking about criminals, and saying perhaps the best way to be a criminal would be to pass bad checks. It was not violent, perpetrators were difficult to catch, and if they were caught, they usually got a slap on the wrist.
Yesterday’s bad check has turned into today’s fraudulent credit card scheme.
Gore said in previous days, people would break into file cabinets to steal personal information. Today, the same information is stored on computer drives, and thieves could be as far away as Eastern Europe.
“The world has shrunk to about this big around,” Gore said, forming a circle by putting his thumbs and index fingers together.
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