Live From Studio 1A: To Catch An ID Thief
Posted: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 7:40 AM by Peter Giordano
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Live from Studio 1A
Chris Hansen, from Dateline NBC, was just on the show to promote his new special tonight, titled "To Catch An ID Thief." WATCH VIDEO. At this point, there are pretty few sectors of the criminal world that Chris has not caught yet, and he's going after the dangerous world of identity fraud tonight. This story spans continents and billions of dollars, since technology makes identity theft an international problem. I was watching the show in the green room with his producer, and chatting more about the investigation that they conducted.
His producer, Rich, told me that this is probably the longest, most in-depth investigation he has ever done. They started working on this story two Januarys ago, in January of 2006. It took a while to get cooperation from some credit card companies, and setting up all of the undercover operations was fairly time-consuming. But their work certainly paid off, and they now have an unprecedented look into the world of credit cards and identity thieves. As we were watching the story, another woman in the green room asked the producer if we were making this up. She was convinced that some of it must be staged, because it's simply too good (is good the word?) to be true. Rich just shook his head, saying that he was dumbfounded during parts of the shoot because it really was difficult to believe. But of course, we don't make this stuff up. Even when Chris came back into the green room, a few people were asking him questions and more follow-up to his story. This topic is certainly something that everyone can relate to, since we all use credit cards and are vulnerable to internet hackers.
Chris offered a couple of tips, including telling us never to use debit cards over the Internet. He also advises us to constantly check our credit record so we know if any extra activity is occurring. And of course, never fill out strange-looking forms from your "bank" asking you for all sorts of personal verification information. Be sure to check out Chris's report on Dateline tonight for more information and the full story of this frightening phenomenon. (Here's a link to Chris' blog entry on the Dateline site.)
