Brand new topic again from Insider Monkey – the biggest identity theft cases in American history. Identity theft cases occur on a daily basis. According to ISAI 2010, every year about 15 million people report being victims of identity theft. The total financial loss every year sums up to $50 billion which is not a small amount. Identity theft has spread worldwide, but America is among the countries with the highest rates of identity theft in the world. What contributed to the spreading of identity theft worldwide is the Internet infrastructure and online banking, which is why this fastest growing crime is not only a problem of the developing countries anymore. Online identity theft cases are becoming a common thing in today’s world.
Now without a further ado let’s see what Insider Monkey has investigated for us. We have picked two of the biggest identity theft cases in American history from their list.
The first one is The Case of Abraham Abdallah, who worked as a restaurant busboy, and was in charge of an Internet-based identity theft scheme — one of the most elaborate in recent years. Using the identities of some of the richest people in the world he was able to gain access to credit card companies, banks, etc. He was able to steal from famous people such as Steven Spielberg, the CNN Founder Ted Turner, and many others including Warren Buffet. He did all this from a library in Brooklyn, New York City. He was finally arrested after the FBI got information from a financial institution that claimed a client of theirs did not request a substantial transfer of money. The second case is Identity Theft in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2014, a man was arrested for a fraud and identity theft filing false tax claims. Mauricio Warner, sentenced to 20 years in prison for the damage caused, managed to pile up more than $5 million by filing false tax returns using victims’ information. What he did was falsely apply for “Free Government Money” to gain money. He was ordered to pay a total of $5,041,869 and all his bank accounts were seized.
