Investigates

  Everyone has heard tips on protecting ourselves, but in CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger's report on May 19, CBS4 viewers heard from someone who was once a professional identity thief. The following is Sallinger's report.

DENVER -- It could happen when you least expect it: without even knowing it, someone can steal your identity and start spending your money.

A woman who resorted to identity theft to steal money spoke to CBS4 on the condition that the station not reveal her identity.

"I just ruined and touched so many people's lives," she said.

The woman said she got hooked on methamphetamine and her life spun out of control. To maintain her $300-a-day drug habit, she said she resorted to identity theft. She said that she now has turned her life around and has agreed to show others how to protect themselves. She also wants to warn people about the dangers of meth.

She took CBS4 to a neighborhood in the mountains and showed some of the things she did when she was a criminal.

"Why would you come up here to the mountains?" Sallinger asked.

"There are rows, like these, of mailboxes with 25 to 30 mailboxes, and people don't check them every day," she said.

Newspapers sitting uncollected were a telltale sign for her that someone was away.

Inside the mailboxes, she said she could find everything she would need to make peoples' lives miserable.

"If we got a credit card from a mailbox we'd watch the mail for the next 2 or 3 days to see if a PIN number was coming so we could withdraw the money at the ATM," she said.

Medical bills could provide her with Social Security numbers and birthdates. Bank statements showed her spending patterns. Her eyes would light up when she found a Social Security card.

"Somebody's Social Security card [was] huge," she said.

Mailboxes in the area where the woman took CBS4 have been hit in the past by identity thieves, CBS4 reports.

"I've talked to the postal carrier a few times and she said, 'Yeah' -- they've had a lot of mail missing up here," one resident said.

Most of the mailboxes the woman pointed out had signs that said "Warning! Willful damage to mail boxes and theft of mail are federal crimes."

"Did (the warning signs) scare you away?" Sallinger asked.

"No, not at all," she said.

What did deter her and her fellow thieves was a mailbox with a lock. "Those people are smart," she said.

She said that people who leave a flag raised on their mailboxes are offering something akin to an invitation to an unwanted guest.

"A lot of times there are flags that are left up and people have left their mail -- their checks and things that they have sent out to pay their bills in," she said.

The ink on those checks can be washed off, then made out to the thief.

One might think her advice would be that people should put their outgoing mail in a regular U.S. Postal Service mailbox, but she said that didn't stop her either.

"We would just take a crowbar, and there's a little ledge on the back [of a mailbox] and you put the crowbar in there and there's a lock, but it's not a very strong one," she said.

Her advice is to mail everything from an actual post office.

"I don't think that people understand the magnitude of this crime that happens here every day," she said.

As a drug addict, she said things got so bad that she would even go through people's trash for documents.

She said that it's wise to use a shredder, but not just any shredder:

"It needs to be a cross-shredder that makes (the shreddings) into a confetti-type," she said.

With the information she obtained as an identity thief, she used hotel keycards as the backing for fake IDs. Office supply stores had what she needed to make phony checks.

"In this day and age, the computers, the printers and stuff and the resolution that they are able to replicate ... you can't tell the difference most of the time," she said.

Her next stop would be a bank, where she cashed checks from her victims' identities.

The woman was charged not just with identity theft crimes, but also racketeering. She faced up to 60 years in prison as part of an identity theft ring, but she cooperated with authorities and is now on probation.

Colorado is one of just two states where a simple case of identity theft is a misdemeanor and not a felony.

CBS4 Video:

Watch Rick Sallinger' Investigates Report

Additional Resources

• Visit Colorado Attorney General's Identity Theft prevention and information page on their Web site.
  
  
• FBI Internet Fraud Web site
  

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