Fake Identity scams

An individual negotiated a price for the laptop with a seller, who seemed leery of being victimized and suggested using a third party shipping company with Escrow,

{Escrow is a legal arrangement in which an asset (often money, but sometimes other property such as art, a deed of title, website, or software source code) is delivered to a third party (called an escrow agent) to be held in trust pending a contingency or the fulfillment of a condition or conditions in a contract such as payment of a purchase price. Upon that event occurring, the escrow agent will deliver the asset to the proper recipient, otherwise the escrow agent is bound by his or her fiduciary duty to maintain the escrow account.}

She and the seller agreed that it would be sent through his suggested shipping company. She wired $300 to what she thought was a shipper and stipulated that said shipper would release the money to the seller when she got the laptop and confirmed that it worked. But she never received the laptop. She had wired the money to a fake shipper’s Web site set up by the scammer, which looked just like a real shipper's site. The seller, posing as the shipping company, had sent her an e-mail with a tracking number indicating that the shipping company had received the laptop. She had then wired $300 to what she thought was the shipper. The laptop never arrived, but the funds were collected. When she contacted the real shipper by phone, she learned about the fake, and that her tracking number was one digit short of legitimate ones. Many others had fallen into the same trap, the real shipper told her.

"Obviously, I should have done something differently," she said, adding she's glad she's out $300 instead of thousands of dollars.

FedEx has seen an increase in scams involving fake Web sites made to look like the company's, a FedEx spokeswoman said. FedEx discourages people from providing personal information in an e-mail and encourages a phone call instead.

"People should be wary of e-mails that ask them to log into another site by clicking on a link inside the email or in an attachment". Hopefully, you're savvy enough to recognize bogus e-mails -- the ones that seem to come from your bank, an online auction site or a foreign lottery official announcing you've won a large cash prize. They are just attempts to steal personal information.

You can't trust any business or anybody, even family members. Despite all the claims of privacy, encryption technology and security firewalls, you've got to be your own information bodyguard.

Craigslist has posted tips on how to identify a potential scam. Among the tips: Deal with people you can meet face to face, never send money via wire services, and athenticate deals involving shipping companies or escrow services.

Shipping companies watch Web sites for inappropriate activity but, in most cases, are unable to take action against the person who register fake sites. "You can't shut anything down until an offence has been committed," he said.

The hoax is one of the most commonly reported, second only to auction-site fraud, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) (IC3) is partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). IC3's mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 gives the victims of cyber crime a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of suspected criminal or civil violations. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at the federal, state, local and international level, IC3 provides a central referral mechanism for complaints involving Internet related crimes. Last year, the Internet Crime Complaint Center reported more than 16,300 cases of fraud involving the non-delivery of merchandise purchased via the Web, a jump of more than 7 percent from 2005.

In a variation of the fake-identity scam, consumers receive authentic-looking e-mails that appear to have come from such legitimate organizations as Amazon.com or Bank of America. In more than 70 percent of the cases, e-mail was the primary means of communication between the scammer and the victim.

In part, the popularity of shipping scams is due to the relatively small dollar amounts involved -- usually around $500, said the deputy director of global security compliance for one shipping company. The amount usually falls under the law enforcement radar for tracking money-laundering. Also, collecting cash at a Western Union or other money-wiring outlet usually requires minimal identification by the recipient, he said, preventing scammers from attracting attention. "They're usually relatively low values," he said. "But it absolutely adds up."

Center for Identity Management and Information Protection                                                                              The center, which was founded last year and operates from Utica College in New York, was created to conduct research on identity theft and fraud. In addition to Utica, its partners are LexisNexis, IBM, the credit bureau TransUnion, the Secret Service, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University and Syracuse University.