This episode is brought to you by Dashlane. Try Dashlane Premium free for 30 days at dashlane.com slash infographics and never forget another password and keep all your online accounts secure. It's self-explanatory what identity theft is. It's when someone steals an identity usually with the objective of using that name to commit a criminal act. That might be traveling from country to country under a name because the thief is wanted by the police.
opening up bank accounts with someone's name, renting properties, or perhaps just opening up social media accounts. It happens more these days only because so much information is available online. Websites can be hacked, people's simple passwords can be cracked, phones can be stolen, wallets can be lost, or people might fall prey to phishing.
And it happens to a lot of people. The website IdentityForce tells us that in 2017, 16.7 million Americans were at least once a victim of identity theft. Today we'll look at some of the bigger cases in this episode of the Infographics Show, Worst Identity Theft Cases.
As that was going on, a serial murderer called Christian Longo, who enjoyed Finkel's writing, was wandering around Mexico calling himself Michael Finkel. He also told people he was a writer for the New York Times. The two eventually met while Longo was in prison.
Their relationship resulted in a book, True Story, Murder, Memoir, Mea Coupa. As we said, this isn't the worst case of identity theft, but it goes to show that if you choose you can leave your current surroundings and just start living as someone else. Now, we'll get to some darker cases of identity theft.
What had happened is her car had been broken into and her wallet was stolen. The person who had stolen that wallet was a pregnant drug addict. That person had walked into a hospital with Sachs'stolen driving license, given birth to a child with meth in their system, and then walked out. Sachs was also left with a $10,000 bill to pay, and she had to clear her name after some amount of stress. She even had to take a DNA test just to prove that she wasn't the mother of the child.
And Davis could only watch on as $500 was taken as an advance loan using that number, while others, apparently 87 in total, used his number. 8. The Cheerleader Did you ever want to know what it feels like to be young again? Well that's what a 33-year-old woman in the USA wanted when she got on the high school cheerleading team.
Wendy Brown, according to The Atlantic, enrolled in a school in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 2008. She was 15, according to her ID, except she was using one of her daughter's IDs. It worked for a while. It said she attended classes, joined the school cheerleading team, and even attended a pool party for that team.
She must have looked very young as this went on for 18 days. Alas, she was found out. I'm not a bad person, I just made a mistake, she later told the press as her trial began. In 2001, The Atlantic reported that she had a criminal past, albeit containing nothing very serious. It seems she had just wanted to be young again and get on the cheerleading team because she had an embattled youth.
She just wanted another chance. She wasn't found guilty of her crime due to mental defects, but she had to spend some time in a mental health facility. 7. Getting into school A woman called Elizabeth Reed became a wanted woman in the USA after using various people's names to get into university. One of those names was of a missing woman, so that didn't go down well with police. Apparently, the high school dropout left her family home and went on a journey throughout the U.S. using different identities.
She would make up stories about herself, including being a champion chess player. But unlike many identity thieves, she didn't steal the names to make a quick buck. Instead, she used those names to educate herself. She assumed the name Natalie Bauman in 2001 and passed the exams to get into California State University.
She became a successful student. and joined many debating teams. She didn't stop there.
Once becoming a student with very good grades at Columbia University, she was eventually arrested and sentenced to 51 months in prison. 6. The young boy who was a woman In a similar case, but a more confounding one, a woman from the Czech Republic became a young boy for a while. Barbara Skrilova was 33 years old when she became a 13-year-old Czech boy, a boy that was missing at the time. Under that identity, she spent four months schooling in Norway. In Norway, the woman had strapped back her breasts and shaved her head and called herself Adam.
How did teachers not see this? A spokesperson for the school told the press, We did react to Adam's behavior, but it's not easy to know. Children at that age can be so different. Adam then went missing and the authorities started a search.
Only when they found him, he turned out to be a woman in her 30s. That woman was then put under psychiatric evaluation. 5. Becoming Yourself Again It's the damnedest thing I ever heard of, police said about the case of this student. His name was Li Ming and he was a graduate student at West Chester University in the USA. During his studies he spent a lot of money on his credit card and he wasn't quite sure how he would pay the debt off, so he did what anyone else would do and faked his own death.
He even got a friend to write an obituary and send it to the local paper. Li Ming was confident that he could then apply for a duplicate birth certificate and also get some more credit cards. He thought it would be ok as in China his name is very common. But then he went on to the Department of Motor Vehicles to apply for a new driver's license, and the person there saw that someone with the same name and identification had apparently died nine months earlier.
Li Ming was then arrested. 4. Fraud An unfortunate California grandmother called Margo Somerville was under investigation in 2007 for what police thought was writing a bunch of fraudulent checks in the USA and getting away with many thousands of dollars. Only the grandmother wasn't at fault. She had had her identity stolen by a woman called Andrea Harris-Fraser. She had taken Somerville's identity by stealing some of her documents.
The thing was, police were certain that the grandmother was lying. She later told the press, The whole thing was really ludicrous. To be honest, if I hadn't had the means to hire a darned good lawyer, I probably would have sat in jail for a very long time. In the end, it worked out for her, and Harris-Fraser was charged with 19 felony counts of theft and criminal impersonation.
Still, Somerville was jailed for a while and treated pretty badly it seems. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? 3. Neighbors from Hell Like many cases we've already talked about, this could happen to anyone.
This is the story of a couple in the USA called Lara Love and David Jackson. This couple were involved in a massive identity theft scheme. and their neighbors were their victims. They would assume the identities of their neighbors using different tactics.
It's said that they would steal mail from nearby mailboxes and also gain information by tapping into neighbors'wifi. Later people on the street noticed they were receiving letters from banks and other organizations that they had not joined. The couple bought stuff on Amazon and also used money on gambling sites, which in all amounted to about $15,000. The neighbors soon got together and realized something was afoot and it was likely someone close by that was to blame.
The couple were charged with theft and also admitted to 30 counts of possessing others identifying information. 2. The Bus Boy This is the case of a man called Abraham Abdallah. In 2001, he was arrested after impersonating some of the world's most famous people. Some of these were Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg.
Using the web and also the local Brooklyn library, the 32-year-old managed to find information about these people and then pretend to be them. According to The Guardian, this clever young man would use web-enabled mobile phones and virtual voicemail services to track packages ordered in his victims'names and pick up messages from anywhere in the US. He also tried to move their money from Wall Street firms and also just run up bills. In all, the media reports that he stole the identity of about 200 celebrities. Later, an NYPD detective said, He's the best I ever faced.
Not bad for a busboy. 1. The Imposter We started with a true story turned into a movie. and we'll finish with one. This movie is called The Impostor, and if you saw it you'll no doubt have had your mind blown.
It's the story of a Frenchman called Frédéric Bourdain, a man who it seems had been impersonating people all his life, but his piece de resistance was when he became a missing boy called Nicholas Barclay. Barclay had gone missing in the US aged 13, and then three years later Bourdain turned up on the doorstep of the family, saying he was their son. He had first been discovered in a small Spanish village, after which the family brought him home to the US. He even had a light French accent and didn't look all that much like the son. While Bourdin was seven years older than he should have been, still the family took him in.
His act was eventually unmasked after a few months. Sadly, as we've seen, identity theft is on the rise, and with so many ways to have your personal information stolen, it can be overwhelming trying to protect yourself from digital crooks. That's why Dashlane has your back.
through their app that lets you store all of your personal information for fast and easy online checkouts. And because it works across every platform, there's no need to re-enter your personal information every time you switch devices. Plus, Dashlane will monitor your personal accounts for you, immediately notifying you of any suspicious activity. And their dark web scan will look for your personal info being bought and sold on the dark web, so you can take steps to protect yourself.
Don't be a victim. Head on over to www.dashlane.com slash infographics for a free 30-day trial. And if you use the coupon code infographics, you can get 10% off a premium subscription. Can you think of any better cases? Have you been a victim of identity theft?
Tell us in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other show, The Rise and Fall of Dark Web Silk Road. Thanks for watching. And as always, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
We'll see you next time.