Identity Theft Is Epidemic. Can It Be Stopped?
AUSING in the foyer of a comfortable suburban home two days before Halloween in 2002, Kevin Barrows, a special agent with the F.B.I., could not bring himself to open the front door. He and a team of agents had just spent several hours searching every room in the house, in New Rochelle, N.Y., but they were leaving empty-handed. Months of investigating had led Mr. Barrows to believe that someone was orchestrating a huge fraud from the house, yet he had not found a single scrap of evidence.
Still, something bothered him about the furniture in one of the bedrooms. It seemed oddly oversized. So he headed back upstairs for a second look, and his attention focused on an expansive canopy over the bed. When he pushed at the draping, he found that it was weighed down with files. They contained reams of confidential financial information about hundreds of individuals whose identities had been pilfered in an intricate scheme that illicitly netted more than $50 million.
Two years later, the New Rochelle home has emerged as a linchpin in what federal law enforcement authorities describe as the biggest case of identity theft ever uncovered in the United States. The scheme was essentially masterminded by just two people: Linus Baptiste, who lived in the house and had contacts with a sprawling ring of Nigerian street criminals, and Philip A. Cummings, his former brother-in-law, who worked as a help-desk clerk at a Long Island software company. At least 30,000 people nationwide were victimized, according to law enforcement authorities and court documents.
"In a lot of ways it could have been the perfect crime," Mr. Barrows, who now works as a private investigator, recalled in a recent interview. "The execution was seamless, a ...