How ID thieves are having new success stealing your bank deposits and checks:-A few months ago, someone faked being me at three different banks and took thousands of dollars from my checking account.
Now there are more chances that something similar will happen to you. Identity theft like this is happening more often now that scammers are smarter than they were during the pandemic. This is because they improved their illegal supply chain, which makes it easier to commit these crimes.
The rise is making banks and the government angry as they try to deal with the new threats. “Yours is not a one-off,” Mary Ann Miller, senior adviser for fraud and cybercrime at Prove Identity, said about my recent experience with ID theft, which I wrote about earlier this year. “An actor going into trees and acting like they did.
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‘The big money grab’
During the pandemic, when the federal government gave $5 trillion to companies and households to help with stimulus checks, increased unemployment benefits, food aid, and loans that could be forgiven, ID theft went up.
“It was the big money grab,” Miller said, adding that thieves wanted a piece of it. Miller said they “skilled up” on making fake names and stealing real ones so they could scam their way into getting these pandemic benefits.
It worked. According to, they stole $300 billion in aid for the pandemic, which is the biggest fraud in history. That success gave scammers the confidence to keep going. “They’ve taken those learnings,” he said, “and they’ve continued to get better and better at what they do.”
‘Very sophisticated manufacturers’
The thief who pretended to be me needed my bank account number and a fake ID to steal money from my account in the old-fashioned way.
This is a great time to use Telegram Web, a cloud-based encrypted instant messaging service that is often used to sell stolen papers. Miller says it’s “the new dark web that’s not so dark.”
He is an associate professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University. During our talk, David Maimon showed me around Telegram. Someone had posted stolen checks from just a few days before that day.
The checks could have been taken from a home or a car. The US mail service is another place where these crimes can happen easily.
There are mail carriers who just take them from the mail they’re meant to deliver. Thieves sometimes target the mail carriers or the well-known blue mailboxes that are set up on public streets. It got so bad that the US Postal Service worked even harder to stop these crimes last year.