The Most Horrific Case Of Identity Theft - YouTube

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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 travelling 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 Identity Force 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.

11.

The journalist We’ll start with a not-so-serious case only

because you may have seen it in a movie and it’s quite interesting.

The story is about an American journalist called Michael Finkel.

Finkel was an up-and-coming writer who was fired from the New York Times in 2002 for

partly fabricating a story.

As that was going on a serial murderer called Christian Longo, who had enjoyed Finkel’s

writing, was wandering about 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 the book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa.”

As we said, this isn’t the worse 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.

10.

Don’t leave your wallet in your car One day a mother of four in the USA got a

call from child protection services saying she was under investigation.

The mother, Anndorie Sachs, listened to the person as they told her she was being watched

after giving birth to a child that had been born with methamphetamine in its blood.

This came as a surprise to her as she hadn’t given birth for quite a few years.

“I was absolutely floored, you would just never imagine in a million years that something

could happen like this,” she later said in a TV appearance.

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 Sach’s stolen driving license, given birth

to a child with meth in its 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 she wasn’t the mother of the child.

9.

Overconfidence This is the story of a man called Todd Davis,

the CEO of an identity theft protection firm.

Davis was perhaps over confident when he began an advertising campaign with his social security

number in full view.

He dared people to try and do anything with that number.

So, people did just that, and Davis could only watch on as $500 was taken as an advanced

loan using that number, while others, apparently 87 people 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’s 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.

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 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 drop-out 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 names to make a quick buck, instead

she used those names to educate herself.

She assumed the name Natalie Bowman 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.

Barbora Skrlova 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.

The woman had strapped back her breasts and shaved her head and had 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 thirties.

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 had 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 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

Margot 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-Frazier.

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-Frazier 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 have already talked about,

this could happen to anyone.

The story is 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 they would steal mail from nearby mail boxes, and also gain information by tapping

into neighbor’s wi fi.

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 those 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 then 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 bus boy.

The Imposter We started with a true story turned into a

movie and we will finish with one.

The movie is called The Imposter and if you saw it you will no doubt have had your mind

blown.

It’s the story of a Frenchman called Frédéric Bourdin, 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 U.S. aged 13, and then three years later Bourdin 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 U.S.

He even had a light French accent and didn’t look all that much like the son, while Bourdin

was 7 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.

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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's Silk Road

. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.

See you next time.