ORGANIZED CRIME AND IDENTITY THEFT

Ten years ago the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) predicted that “fraud will be the crime of choice for the 21st century.”

Today the ACFE concludes that fraud in the US alone exceeds $600 Billion dollars annually.

Many of these fraud schemes are the result of identity theft and impersonation crimes.

Organized crime groups, have in recent years, seized upon new technologies to increase criminal attacks. These technological resources include powerful computers, advanced servers, state of the art networking equipment, skilled programmers and even computer scientists with advanced skills.

In the database world, in which our personal information resides, there is a cyber war between organized crime groups and businesses. Crime groups seek to break into personal information databases and businesses struggle to counter these attacks in protecting their data.

Detica, a leader in financial crimes prevention, in a recent article describe new developments in organized criminal attacks on databases.

“The modern criminal has adapted to these new environments, developing new ways of perpetrating serious financial crimes while continuing to operate below the radar. This new modus-operandi is characterized by well organized executions of many smaller frauds spread across multiple individuals and often across a number of financial institutions.”

Rather than launch massive attacks against a data base, which is easily detected, the new criminal technique is to target databases in low volume and low frequency attacks. By flying “under the radar” organized groups can repeatedly attack databases with far less chance of detection.