Released: July 04, 2006

ID thief finds easy money hard to resist

Source: By Tom Zeller, Jr. New York Times (Free Registration)

By the time of Shiva Brent Sharma’s third arrest for identity theft, at the age of 20, he had taken in well over $150,000 in cash and merchandise in his brief career. After a certain point, investigators stopped counting. Mr. Sharma was arrested three times in three years on charges related to identity theft.

The biggest money was coming in at the end, postal inspectors said, after Mr. Sharma had figured out how to buy access to stolen credit card accounts online, change the cardholder information and reliably wire money to himself — sometimes using false identities for which he had created pristine driver’s licenses.

But Mr. Sharma, now 22, says he never really kept track of his earnings. “I don’t know how much I made altogether, but the most I ever made in a quick period was like $20,000 in a day and a half or something,” he said, sitting in the empty meeting hall at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., where he is serving a two- to four-year term. “Working like three hours today, three hours tomorrow — $20,000.”

And once he knew what he was doing, it was all too easy. “It’s an addiction, no doubt about that,” said Mr. Sharma, who inflected his words with the sort of street cadence adopted by smart kids trying to be cool. “I get scared that when I get out, I might have a problem and relapse because it would be so easy to take $300 and turn it into several thousand.”

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