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Identity Harvesting
The cottage industry of Identity Harvesting (I H) is blossoming into a thriving business. I H has two practical uses in today’s marketplace.
First, I H was initially designed to assume someone’s identity and then go shopping with their credit cards or bank accounts. Because the lifeline was short-lived, these identity thefts depended upon a constant flow of new personas. The bad actor bought a block of stolen credit cards, driver’s licenses, and social security numbers. A block of a thousand cards typically costs twenty dollars each on the Darknet. The thieves became that person until the credit card company put a hold on transactions. Not an elegant business, it fell to the script kiddies and newbie criminal want-to-be just starting their life of crime. It’s a volume business, but the returns are modest for the effort. Clumsy use of identity theft will often yield jail time. You don’t think so? Try using a false identity and watch felony counts climb to the top of the ladder.
The cryptocurrency industry is the newest group to leverage I H due to the know-your-customer (KYC) rules crypto exchanges try to observe. Crypto exchanges are required by the governments in the countries where they are based on having solid identification of each customer seeking transactions. These are the same rules all banking institutions must observe to combat money laundering efforts. If the practice…
