Dateline has a new series called ‘To Catch an Identity Thief,’ a spinoff of their popular ‘To catch a Predator’ series about catching Internet sex predators.  The new series targets identity thieves that acquire personal information and use this data to make purchases online.

What’s interesting is that there are many components to the identity theft process.  First, you have the actual identity theft, which can occur through phishing, keyloggers, hacking a store database, etc.  There is an online market for stolen identities, which are traded for cash or other types of information.  The dateline show says a single identity can be purchased for as low as $5.  In their investigation, they posted a bait credit card number in an online chatroom, and the card, which had a credit line of $1,000, was maxed in only 13 minutes.

The next part of the process is more interesting.  Most identity thieves are not located in the US - and that is a problem because few online retailers will ship internationally.  The solution?  Establish contacts in the US that are willing to forward packages to foreign countries.

Dateline investigates these forwarders by creating a fake online retailer that supposedly has weak protections for credit card users.  The investigators then post information about the retailer in the chat rooms of identity thieves, and the store is quickly use to purchase electronics with stolen credit cards.  They then follow the addresses to the actual houses of these forwarders.

Interestingly, Dateline uncovered several of these forwarders that were brought into the scam by an online relationship.  These people met someone overseas online, and started what seem to be pretty serious relationships.  Three of them were actually engaged to these foreign contacts.  In the meantime, the foreign contacts had packages shipped to their US-based ‘fiances,’ who then re-ship the packages to an address overseas.

This is sad for the forwarders, because they are basically being used with the promise of marriage.  A lot of these people are older single women that are probably lonely.

Moreover, one of the forwarders shipped packages with their own money - with the promise of getting reimbursed by their fiances.  One guy spend his whole savings - over $40k, to forward packages to a supposed model that he met online.  This model sent him pictures, and promised to marry him.  The guy, of course, was duped.  The funniest thing about this guy was that he talked to Chris Hanson, who was undercover, about the other To Catch a Predator series without knowing who he was taking to.

In any case, the show was very revealing.  Some forwarders literally had rooms of merchandise to forward.  Most people only think of the people that get their identities stolen, but Dateline uncovered the unfortunate story of the forwarders who are also played.  The forwarders seem very naive, small town aw-shucks kinds of folks.  It’s interesting to learn that these identity thieves have resorted to using online relationships to build contacts.

In the next show, which airs next tuesday, dateline will actually go to the addresses that the forwarders send packages to.  These include addresses in Europe, Africa, Asia - all over the world really.  It’s a great premise that does a good job of laying out the whole process of identity theft.

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