What Law Enforcement is Doing

Posted on 07/01/2009 by US Treasury Dept

Larry, we turn to you again as our law enforcement officer. How are we doing against this?

A few years ago we saw a lot of mister meaner crimes in dealing with identity theft. Now, folks are going to jail as felons. We've also seen a just a year, year and half ago the passing of the identity theft enhancement act which tacks on two additional years for any component of identity theft within the crime.

So automatically

Automatically

Yes, great. So law enforcement is doing a great job we are hearing, tracking these criminals down and their work is reflected in the success of prosecutions as deputy assistant attorney general Laura Parsky from the criminal division of the department of justice explains.

Hello, I am Laura Parsky of the US department of justice. I would like to share with you what the justice department is doing aggressively to prosecute identity theft crime. We have 94 United States attorney's offices across the country as well as criminal division prosecutors who work with federal agents to go after identity thieves. Our job is to get these criminals behind bars and out of circulation. Recently, we have been extremely successful in securing long sentences that are warranted by the damage caused by identity theft crimes. In New York for example, a man who arranged for the theft and sale of tens of thousands of peoples credit reports received a fourteen year sentence. In Washington DC, a man who led a one point one million dollar identity theft and credit card fraud scheme also received fourteen years in prison. The computer hacker in Charlotte, North Carolina who broke into the computers of a major retail company to steal credit card information was sentenced to nine years. And someone running a phishing scheme in Houston, Texas was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Serious sentences like these are only possible because of solid investigative work from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the United States Secret Service, and the US Postal Inspection Service, but we also need your help. If you are a victim of identity theft the best thing you can do to serve justice is to file a police report. The more details you can give the investigators the better chance they can bring us a good case to prosecute. Together we can take the profit out of identity theft. Thank you.