Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

Windsor Star: OLG coughs up cash

“The insider policy is to guard against fraud, such as a retailer who tells a customer a ticket is not a winner and then tries to claim the prize. In the spring of 2007, a provincial ombudsman issued a scathing report on the OLG and said Ontario store owners and their families had collected tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims.”

MarketWatch: Worldwide thefts cost retailers US $104 billion annually - Survey

“This year’s survey, the most complete analysis of global shrink ever conducted, reports key findings on retail shrinkage and crime in 36 countries and on five continents, based on data from a confidential survey of 920 large retailers with combined sales of U.S. $814 billion and 115,612 operating retail outlets…’This sum represents a tax imposed on honest people by retail criminals of $229.73 per household or $71.12 for every single person in the 36 countries surveyed,’ said Professor Bamfield, Director of the Centre for Retail Research.”

Jackson Citizen Patriot: Kids learn online dangers

“Internet predators lurk on networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, or in chat rooms, looking for young victims. ‘Everybody you meet online is an Internet stranger,’ Malik Williams, an Internet-safety presenter from the Michigan Cyber Safety Initiative, told more than 50 fifth-graders Tuesday at Concord Elementary School. ‘That’s why it’s important to keep yourself safe.’”

Bucyrus TelegraphForum: Bucyrus experiences rash of break-ins

“‘There is a new trend in what we call e-fencing. Thieves are selling their stolen items on the Internet versus just selling them outright. They can get up to 70 percent or more of the value if they sell on the Internet versus selling them on the streets, where they only get about 30 percent of the value,’ Teets said.”

SFGate: Ex-S.F. firefighter’s workers’ comp problem

“Indeed, if Hijjawi were trying to hide her fitness quest, she wasn’t doing a very good job. Our own Google search turned up records showing her running in marathons in Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, Honolulu and elsewhere. From 2001 to 2006, according to records on the Web site Athlinks, Hijjawi ran in no fewer than a dozen marathons. And her biography on another site shows she was taking on even bigger challenges, including the Canada 2005 Ultraman super triathlon competition - in which competitors swim 6.2 miles, ride a bike for 170 miles and run 52 miles, twice the distance of a marathon. Completing it took her more than 33 hours.”

Bunker Blog: Update On Cops Involved In Major Shoplifting Ring

“Kevin Burchell and Clifford Barber, both police officers, worked with two others, one of them an employee at the Walmart the items were taken from; to get up to $200,000.00 worth of merchandise out of the store and onto an eBay site. According to the latest report, Barber was the mastermind behind the scheme, and sold the items on eBay and to friends and acquaintances.”

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With each new revelation of lottery fraud, the urgency of preventing further occurrences intensifies. It’s now a top line issue for lottery commissions because it threatens to significantly decrease revenue. The danger is that the number of consumers feeling at risk about being paid on a winning ticket could reach a tipping point. An affected lottery could see a substantial decrease in revenue almost overnight, and it’s difficult to predict when that tipping point will be reached.

Detecting and preventing lottery fraud requires a specialized combination of experience and technology. In particular, when lottery fraud is committed by retailers, the people defrauding the system are aware of just how the system works, so the solution has to be able to outsmart people who know all the tricks.

The same can be said for Organized Retail Crime fraud.  These types of crimes cost the retail industry over $40 billion a year. In helping retail customers attack these problems, our identity resolution software churns through enterprise identity data (e.g., employees, merchandise returns, customers, shoplifters, bad check data) to resolve identities and detect hidden relationships.

As with retail, the data to detect lottery fraud is readily available, but solving the crime requires knowledge about handling multiple, disparate data sources and how to find hidden connections using identity resolution. In fact, the parameters of lottery fraud are strikingly similar to retail fraud. Someone who understands how the system works fraudulently fences merchandise (or a winning lottery ticket).  Retailers can check potential fraudsters against a list of employees and known shoplifters, while government-run lotteries can check winners against lists of lottery retailers and – for example - delinquent taxpayers.

Forward-thinking lotteries are quickly moving to exploit solutions based on identity resolution to solve the problem. The risk of declining revenues is just too high to do nothing.

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By the Infoglide Team

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.                                                  – W. Clement Stone

We recently shared a link to an article describing how trucking companies in California illegally mislabeled their drivers as “independent contractors” in order to keep from paying workers’ compensation insurance. The law clearly defines the drivers as “employees” since the companies own the trucks and define everything the drivers do.

Because identity resolution software is often used to detect fraudulent behavior, we continually hear of instances like this one where people try to cut corners or take unfair advantage or flat out cheat other people and companies in ways that often involve obscuring identity information. People try to game software systems and cheat in areas like workers’ compensation, online commerce, lotteries, retail, airlines, insurance, social networking, and others. (You can read more on our web site and in previous blog posts here.)

Almost all of us know the right way and the wrong way to do things. Sadly, we sometimes choose to ignore that inner voice when it benefits us, even though it may harm someone else. OK, so we can’t fix the world with a blog post, but it’s hard not to speculate what the world might be like if we all tried to do the right thing all the time.

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By the Infoglide Team

CIOZone: What To Do About Bad Data

“The amount of data is doubling every 12 to 18 months—but much of it is inaccurate, incomplete or otherwise flawed. And bad data costs organizations between 10 to 20 percent of revenue. But there are steps CIOs can take to fix the data problem.”

ZDNet: Data Quality - Upstream or Downstream?

“How come most companies start worrying about the quality of your data only when it’s already dirty and in use? How come it doesn’t occur to them that the quality of data needs to be thought through before it’s actually captured? Even at the early stages of data capturing, data quality already plays an important role in the future of the company.”

Star-Ledger: eBay makes bid to oppose limits on online sales

“The big-box retail chains say they are concerned eBay and similar online sales sites offer professional shoplifters a largely anonymous venue for e-fencing their stolen goods. But eBay says brick-and-mortar retailers are using the argument as a ploy to try and stifle competition from online sellers. Coming as it does at the threshold of the holiday shopping season, there is a lot at stake for both sides in this Goliath vs. Goliath battle for the hearts and wallets of American consumers.”

CNW Group: Protecting lottery customers

“Over the past 12 months, OLG has taken significant action toward protecting lottery customers from theft and fraud.”

Your Industry News: Stopgap Bill Includes $101B For DOD Procurement

“The $630 billion-plus stopgap spending bill signed into law by President Bush includes $487.7 billion to fund the Defense Department and more than $40 billion to fund the Homeland Security Department through the end of fiscal 2009.”

Vancouver Sun: The war on retail crime

“Technology is becoming sophisticated enough to recognize when conventional patterns are broken, such as a door that is only entered by employees coming from a certain direction.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Lottery Scam: Lottery Scam Watch - Keep Track of Your Tickets

“The ticket was bought in May. When the ticket holder came to the store for verification, the clerk allegedly told him he was mistaken and kept the ticket. A police report contends that Melissa Trahan, 27, sent the winning slip to her mother in Mississippi. That woman, Gwen Landry, drove to the state capital, Baton Rouge, and cashed it in for the $800,000.”

Hub Solution Designs: Customer Data Quality

“Sometimes, attempts are made to programmatically improve data quality within a customer record, but because of tight deadlines, data quality across the file is usually not given serious attention.”

CT.gov: Waterford Town Employee Charged with Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“The warrant alleges that Mr. Hall ‘intentionally misrepresented his claimed injury and intentionally failed to disclose his employment and wage earnings while collecting disability benefits.’”

Homeland Security Watch: Senate Introduces its First DHS Authorization Bill

“The Senate bill elevates the assistant secretary for policy to the position of Under Secretary for Policy, to ensure policy coordination across the Department, it strengthens the authorities of the Office of International Affairs at DHS, and it authorizes the National Cyber Security Center, along with a private sector board to advise the Secretary on cyber security policy.”

Workers Compensation: California Fines Auto Body Shops Without Workers’ Comp Insurance

“Failure to carry workers’ compensation insurance is fraud, plain and simple. This is a form of workers’ compensation fraud – not having the appropriate coverage – is more common than you might think.”

Central Coast News: Santa Cruz police crack large commercial burglary case at Safeway

“Safeway loss prevention officers notified Santa Cruz police on Sept. 9 that the company’s store on Morrissey Boulevard had lost a significant amount of merchandise to theft and store managers suspected that an employee, Emanuel Anthony Ruiz, 30, was stealing merchandise. He allegedly took cosmetics, shoes, clothing and over-the-counter pharmaceutical items, including medications, from the store, police reported. Ruiz, with the help of the three others arrested, was then selling the items online, police said.”

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[Post from Infoglide] California Lottery Fraud

“[N]ow state and provincial authorities are shifting resources to address another rapidly growing problem: lottery fraud committed by retailers. The most highly-publicized case of retailer lottery fraud in recent years occurred in Ontario but cases reported by the California Lottery Commission, perhaps the largest lottery in the U.S., indicate that they have a rapidly growing problem as well.”

Information & Data Quality Conference 2008 Blog: IAIDQ Announces Plans for Certified Information Quality Professional certification

“The IDQ 2008 conference is over (but I’ve a tonne of posts to upload tomorrow sketched out on my laptop). However, one piece of news was announced at this week’s conference which too important to hold until the airport departure lounge….”

Telegraph.co.uk: Standard Life in call for HBOS insider trading probe

“Details of the takeover talks between Lloyds and HBOS were announced by BBC business editor Robert Peston on Wednesday morning at 9am, sending shares soaring from their low of 88p to 215p in an hour. The deal was not formally announced until four hours later. However, in two trades at 8:57am and 8:58pm, two buyers alone acquired more than 20m HBOS shares at 96p. In total, around 160m shares changed hands in the moments before the takeover was announced, making a paper profit of nearly £190m for the traders and leading to suspicion of a leak.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network - Blog: David Loshin: IDQ 2008 - Initial Observations

“As I am slowly emerging from the cocoon imposed by the needs of getting my new book on Master Data Management out the door, I am able to get back to everyday life, including two of my favorite activities (together!!) - conference attendance and blogging. Anyway, I am currently in San Antonio attending the 2008 Information and Data Quality conference.”

Data Governance and Data Quality Insider: Are There Business Advantages to Poor Data Management?

“However, this got me thinking. Could the inability for the stores to maintain more that 18 months of records actually be a business advantage? How many customers lose the paperwork, or even forget about their road hazard policies and just pay the replacement price? How much additional revenue was this shortcoming actually generating each year?”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

When I say “lottery fraud” you probably think of the email scam where an unsolicited message from overseas claims you’ve won a large lottery and asks you to send them money, identity information, or both in order to get a big payoff. Many states (e.g., Texas) and provinces have web pages warning consumers about these rip-offs.

Public education has reduced the effectiveness of this particular swindle. And now state and provincial authorities are shifting resources to address another rapidly growing problem: lottery fraud committed by retailers. The most highly-publicized case of retailer lottery fraud in recent years occurred in Ontario, but cases reported by the California Lottery Commission, perhaps the largest lottery in the U.S., indicate that they have a rapidly growing problem as well.

In July, the California Lottery Commission announced their recent success in using undercover work to catch a retailer in Santa Clara County who was defrauding lottery customers. In another case in San Diego, a retailer was sentenced for paying lottery ticket holders less than they actually won and then redeeming the tickets himself for full value.

The cases being caught and publicized likely represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg. While using undercover agents is effective, it’s a very expensive and time-consuming way to catch fraudsters. More precisely, it’s not a very scalable solution because the number of instances of fraud caught is limited by the number of agents deployed.

A more scalable approach to this problem is deploying identity resolution software to constantly monitor and detect hidden connections among the players in the system, for example non-obvious ties between retailer owners/employees and lottery winners. Retailers who game the system change details about their identities to avoid being found out. That may fool conventional software systems, but identity resolution easily catches them, and there’s a bonus – the same software that catches scam artists can match lottery winners with lists of people identified by the state for delinquent taxes, past-due child support, and similar indebtedness that should be collected before paying out lottery winnings.

Lottery players simply will not play if they can’t trust the lottery system. And if they don’t play, revenues will inevitably decline. While sting operations can help restore confidence in the system, they represent an expensive, manpower-intensive, hit-or-miss approach to the retailer fraud problem. Software is the only efficient and cost-effective solution to the retailer fraud problem in lottery systems.

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Sexual Predators: Can Technology Be Turned Against Them?

“At the recent International Conference on Cybercrime Forensics Education and Training in Canterbury UK, international experts discussed the challenges involved in keeping up with increasingly sophisticated criminals who target children on the internet. They covered a wide array of subjects that illustrated the complex ways that computer systems are exposed, including topics like mobile phone forensic investigation, the social effects of Spam, digital intrusion forensics, implications and methodology of facial ID training, and virtual reality police training.”

San Diego 6: Retailer Sentenced For Redeeming Lottery Tickets for Less Than Real Value

“Saeed Zori, 62, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to attempted grand theft. He was one of four retailers caught up in a law enforcement sting targeting lottery fraud.”

Evolution of Security: Bar-Coded Boarding Passes – Secure, Mobile, and On The Way

“These mobile boarding passes have digital signatures embedded in the barcodes. Officers who do the document checking are equipped with handheld barcode scanners (generously on loan from our partners) and can confirm the authenticity of the boarding pass instantly. This isn’t rocket science – the (2010 NL East Champion) Nationals use the same process at their new ballpark – and it’s working really well for both TSA and passengers.”

Andy on Enterprise Software: Burning Platform

“Companies struggle to get good management information (for example about levels of counterparty risk for trading organisations such as investment banks) due to inconsistent master data across multiple systems. When times are booming this may be glossed over, but with prestigious companies going to the wall on a daily basis, being certain of the information that you rely on gets a higher priority.”

Homeland Security Watch: Roadmap for Homeland Security Enterprise Released

“A new analysis and set of recommendations entitled Homeland Security 3.0 rolled out yesterday at the National Press Club.”

International Security Info Watch: Congressional hearing to address organized retail crime

“On Sept. 22, 2008, at 4 p.m., at 2141 Rayburn House, Congressman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) will be holding a hearing on the topic of organized retail crime. Scott is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. . . . Organized retail crime (ORC), sometimes also called organized retail theft, typically involves crime rings that steal on demand. Those crime rings work as groups for store theft, and a typical ORC ring will steal mass quantities of merchandise with plans to resell that merchandise to unwitting individuals and often independent retailers.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

At the recent International Conference on Cybercrime Forensics Education and Training in Canterbury UK, international experts discussed the challenges involved in keeping up with increasingly sophisticated criminals who target children on the internet. They covered a wide array of subjects that illustrated the complex ways that computer systems are exposed, including topics like mobile phone forensic investigation, the social effects of Spam, digital intrusion forensics, implications and methodology of facial ID training, and virtual reality police training.

Pedophiles use multiple forms of internet communication to share information, including photographs. A recent infamous example in the UK is Philip Anthony Thompson. A British police unit discovered that his home computer was hosting a quarter of a million child porn images, including 3000 depicting sadistic abuse, and that Thompson served as an administrator of a forum that enabled and encouraged sharing of images and knowledge. 

Is the fact that Thompson was caught a sign that law enforcement has the problem under control? Not exactly. Denis Edgar-Nevill, chairman of the cybercrime forensics conference, pointed out that “people should not believe that cybercrime is being dealt with well or that it is something law enforcement agencies are on top of.” He was not being critical of law enforcement, and in fact he commended them for work in certain areas. It’s just that the scale of the problem is so huge, and with the growing number of avenues for people to communicate, it’s incredibly difficult for enforcement agencies to keep up. Their resources are divided across a number of cybercrimes, and, for better or worse, financial crimes are often considered more serious.

Given the finite human resources of police agencies, can technology fill the gap? Sexual predation depends on the use of fraudulent identities. Identity resolution technology has been used to fight many other types of fraud. It can find stolen goods being fenced on eBay by ORC groups. Stock exchanges find hidden relationships that lead to identification of insider trades. Retailers use it to detect and prevent deceptive returns of stolen merchandise by deceitful employees. Lotteries can detect false claims with winning tickets. Workers’ compensation agencies leverage identity resolution to identify fraudulent claims. And terrorists are prevented from boarding airplanes.

With proper cooperation between law enforcement agencies and information technology vendors, surely identity resolution technology can enable the development of automated systems that will shine a light on predators and greatly diminish their ability to operate under the radar of police groups.

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By the Infoglide Team

Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds: Lottery Bandit Nabbed in California

“In May, alert SaveMart grocery store employees noted an individual attempting to cash in a on a winning lottery ticket reported stolen in the burglaries. . . . It’s pretty obvious that the alert employees at SaveMart were tipped off electronically that the ticket(s) being presented were ‘hot.’ . . . This isn’t the first time in recent history, the California Lottery Police have made headlines. In May, it was announced that they were using undercover agents to catch dishonest retailers, who were cheating winners out of their prizes. Winning tickets of $500 to $25,000 were presented to retailers and several of them were caught pretending the prize was smaller and keeping the proceeds for themselves. Several arrests were made throughout California as a result of the sting.”

Informatica Perspectives: Communicating the Value of Data Quality

“Many of our customers express frustration that even though it is quite obvious how their business suffers from poor data quality, they find it difficult to convince their associates to invest in initiatives that correct the problems. Earlier this year, we participated in Rob Karel’s Forrester research that addresses this issue. The resulting research paper is titled ‘A Truism for Trusted Data: Think Big, Start Small’ and its getting a lot of interest. . . . The report is available from Forrester’s web site. It contains some nice examples of how customers have built a business case for justifying investment in Data Quality.”

KRISTV.com: Squabble Heats Up Over Online Sale of Stolen Goods

“Lawmakers are pushing for a crackdown on online marketplaces, such as eBay, Yahoo, Overstock.com and others, for inadequate efforts to block the sale of stolen products on their platforms. . . . The proposed legislation is the latest skirmish in an ongoing battle over Internet intermediaries’ responsibility for their customers’ actions. Supporters of the bill want online marketplaces to more closely monitor transactions on their sites. They say the technology exists for the sites to track stolen goods sales, whether through targeting sellers who are known for proffering the products or hunting down frequently stolen goods.”

PogoWasRight.org: DHS Privacy Office - Privacy Impact Assessments

“The following Privacy Impact Assessments have been added to DHS’s site:”

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