A sharp nine-year-old girl has a biting message to a 51-year-old man, according to an article on myfoxboston.com:
“You deserve to stay in jail because you break into peoples houses. Stop breaking into peoples houses and do something with your life.”
This advice was directed to Pedro Gomez, whom police are labeling a career criminal. According to investigators, he attempted to break into over a dozen houses—all within the span of hours.
One of the failed attempts occurred to a house where the nine-year-old was at at the time. Gomez’s floundering break-in attempts occurred in Shrewsbury, Mass. I’m not so sure he’s a true “career criminal,” because he certainly didn’t do things like a prolific burglar would. This sounds more like random, haphazard, desperate, non-calculated attempts to bust into the nearest homes.
Pedro even apparently stacked patio furniture up against windows in one of his break-in attempts.
There are different kinds of robbers, and one of them is that of the unskilled kind who breaks into homes to get whatever cash or small sellable items he could get his hands on to support his next drug fix. This could very well be the type of criminal that Gomez is.
Gomez tripped an alarm when he tried to get in through a slider type of door, continues the myfoxboston.com article. It was there that the police caught up with him. The report says that he had already broken into houses in three other towns.
Though he didn’t exactly hang his head upon being arrested, he will have plenty of time in prison to reflect upon the advice of the nine-year-old girl.
The feds are getting better at busting criminals every day. Seventeen criminals, many from Eastern Europe, pilfered more than 95,000 stolen credit card numbers and $4 million worth of fraudulent transactions.
The New York Times reports the men were involved in a vast conspiracy known as the Western Express Cybercrime Group, which trafficked in stolen credit card information through the Internet and used it to create forged credit cards and to sell goods on eBay. They used digital currencies like e-gold and Webmoney to launder their proceeds.
Several of the scammers — Viatcheslav Vasilyev, Vladimir Kramarenko, Egor Shevelev, Dzimitry Burak and Oleg Kovelin — were charged with corruption. Vasilyev, 33, and Kramarenko, 31, were arrested at their homes in Prague, have been extradited to Manhattan. Shevelev, 23, was arrested in Greece last year, is still awaiting extradition. Burak, 26, a citizen of Belarus and Kovelin, 28, a citizen of Moldova have not been arrested
Vasilyev and Kramarenko recruited work from home employees to advertise and sell electronics on eBay. When someone would purchase an item, the two men would pocket the buyer’s payment, give a cut to their recruit, then use a stolen credit card number to purchase the item from a retail store and send it to the buyer. In essence, they used eBay to obtain a legitimate buyer’s credit card number through a legitimate channel and didn’t actually “hack” anything. They simply set up pseudo-fake auctions that, in most cases, delivered the product, but also obtained the victim’s credit card number and then made fraudulent charges.
Burak and Shevelev were “carders” who sold stolen credit card information on a website called Dumpsmarket and, probably, in chat rooms. “Dumps” is a criminal term for stolen credit cards and “carders” are the scammers who buy and sell them. Kovelin was a criminal hacker who stole victims’ financial information via phishing emails and more than likely used the victims’ own account information against them.
Protect yourself:
Check your credit card statements often, especially after using an online auction site. Refute unauthorized charged within 60 days to be made whole by the issuing bank.
Don’t just buy the lowest priced product on and auction site. Use auction sellers who have been approved my many and have a solid track record.
Anytime you ever receive an email asking for personal information, credit information, banking etc, do not enter it. Just hit delete. Often victims will receive and email from a trusted source like eBay directly to their account because they have been actively engaging the fraudulent auctioneer. eBays system doesn’t recommend giving your credit card information outside their network in an email.
Get a credit freeze. Go to ConsumersUnion.org and follow the steps for your particular state. This is an absolutely necessary tool to secure your credit. In most cases, it prevents new accounts from being opened in your name. This makes your Social Security number useless to a potential identity thief.
ABC news and a bazillion other outlets report that a former informant for the Secret Service was one of three men charged with stealing credit and debit card information from 170 million accounts in the largest data breach in history. The former informant, Albert Gonzalez of Florida, A.K.A “Segvec”, “SoupNazi,” and “j4guar17,” whose motto was ”Get Rich or Die Tryin'” was alleged to have been the ringleader of the criminal hacking operation of a prolific network that spans over five years of serious criminal activity. Once a criminal, always a criminal.
Gonzalez and two other unidentified hackers believed to be from Russia have been charged with hacking into Heartland Payment Systems, 7-11 and Hannaford Brothers Company, Dave and Busters and TJX Corporation, which involved up to 45 million credit card numbers..
Gonzalez was originally arrested in 2003 by the U.S. Secret Service and began working with the agency as an informant. Federal investigators say they later learned that the hacker had been tipping off other hackers on how to evade detection of security and law enforcement worldwide.
Gonzalez provided “sniffer” software used to intercept the credit and debit card numbers for the Russian hackers. Sniffer software or “malware” malicious software, acts like a virus attaching itself to a network and often spreading. The software allows the criminal hacker backdoor access to all the data in the server and provides remote control functionality.
The NY Times reports according to the indictment, Gonzalez and his conspirators reviewed lists of Fortune 500 companies to decide which corporations to take aim at and visited their stores and used a technique called “wardriving” to monitor wireless networks. The online attacks took advantage of flaws in the SQL programming language, which is commonly used for databases.
Threat Level, by Wired magazine, reported that Gonzalez had lived a lavish lifestyle in Miami, once spending $75,000 on a birthday party for himself and complaining to friends that he had to manually count thousands of $20 bills when his counting machine broke.
Protect yourself;
1. You can’t prevent this type of credit card fraud from happening to you when the retailer isn’t protecting your data. Eventually credit card protection solutions will be available. For now, protecting yourself from account takeover is relatively easy. Simply pay attention to your statements every month and refute unauthorized charges immediately. I check my charges online once every two weeks. If I’m traveling extensively, especially out of the country, I let the credit card company know ahead of time, so they won’t shut down my card while I’m on the road.
2. Prevent new account fraud. Get a credit freeze. Go to ConsumersUnion.org and follow the steps for your particular state. This is an absolutely necessary tool to secure your credit. In most cases, it prevents new accounts from being opened in your name. This makes your Social Security number useless to a potential identity thief.
3. Invest in Intelius Identity Theft Protection and Prevention. While not all forms of identity theft can be prevented, you can effectively manage your personal identifying information by knowing what’s buzzing out there in regards to YOU.
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Speaker discussing credit card data breaches and the sad state of cyber security on Fox News
https://safr.me/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/small-logo-safr-me-300x98.png00Robert Sicilianohttps://safr.me/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/small-logo-safr-me-300x98.pngRobert Siciliano2009-08-28 11:13:592009-08-28 11:13:59Big Time Identity Theft Hackers Indicted
(BOSTON, Mass. – Aug. 21, 2007 – IDTheftSecurity.com) According to various reports, last week authorities arrested members of an identity theft ring that was targeting members of the Forbes 400 list. Robert Siciliano, a widely televised and quoted personal security and identity theft expert, said the superrich aren’t the only targets of identity theft, often the work of organized criminals.
“Organized crime rings, both international and domestic, have shown an affinity for identity theft,” said Siciliano. “This is nothing new. It’s also why a robust, flexible federal policy to counter identity theft is so important.”
CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com and a member of the Bank Fraud & IT Security Report’s editorial board, Siciliano leads Fortune 500 companies and their clients in workshops that explore consumer education solutions for security issues. A longtime identity theft speaker and author of “The Safety Minute: 01,” he has discussed data security and consumer protection on CNBC, on NBC’s “Today Show,” FOX News, and elsewhere.
On Aug. 16, Reuters and others reported that U.S. authorities had “crack[ed] an identity theft ring…whose targets included billionaires from the Forbes magazine ranking of the richest 400 Americans.” Research has established that identity thieves target not only high-income bracket earners (i.e., those whose annual earnings exceed $75,000), but also households headed by people ages 18 to 24, regardless of income. U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics from 2004 revealed that these two demographic groups were the most likely to experience identity theft.
The ringleader behind the theft of financial information from those listed on Forbes 400 reportedly gained access to the data via his Internet connection overseas. According to Siciliano, the group’s methods and hierarchy resembled organized crime’s telltale modus operandi. He further noted that Nigerian criminals were found to be behind the socially engineered breach of data at ChoicePoint Inc. over two years ago, and that reports have documented organized crime’s suspected involvement in data security breaches since.
“Anyone, at any income level, is a potential target of identity thieves,” said Siciliano, “In fact, often an identity thief or identity theft ring will steal literally thousands of people’s identifying information to fake several identities, engaging in subsequently fraudulent activities under many names, an approach that can frustrate law enforcement’s efforts and may be easier to pull off under the auspices of organized frameworks involving many criminals, not just one.”
Readers may view YouTube video below of Siciliano on MSNBC discussing an elaborate, organized crime ring that involved restaurant workers using card-skimming devices to commit systematic fraud with patrons’ credit card numbers. Readers may learn how to protect themselves against identity theft, a major concern for anyone whose electronic communication devices have been hacked, by viewing video of Siciliano at VideoJug.
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About IDTheftSecurity.com
Identity theft affects us all. Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com and member of the Bank Fraud & IT Security Report’s editorial board, makes it his mission to provide consumer education solutions on identity theft to Fortune 500 companies and their clients.
A leader of personal safety and security seminars nationwide, Siciliano has been featured on “The Today Show,” CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, “FOX News,” “The Suze Orman Show,” “The Montel Williams Show,” “Maury Povich,” “Sally Jesse Raphael,” “The Howard Stern Show,” and “Inside Edition.” The Privacy Learning Institute features him on its Website. Numerous magazines, print news outlets, and wire services have turned to him, as well, for expert commentary on personal security and identity theft. These include Forbes, USA Today, Entrepreneur, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, United Press International, Reuters, and others.
https://safr.me/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/small-logo-safr-me-300x98.png00Robert Sicilianohttps://safr.me/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/small-logo-safr-me-300x98.pngRobert Siciliano2007-08-21 21:07:142007-08-21 21:07:14Identity Theft Expert and Speaker on Personal Security Points to Organized Crime and Warns that Identity Thieves Target All Demographics—Not Just the Wealthy
“You deserve to stay in jail because you break into peoples houses. Stop breaking into peoples houses and do something with your life.”
