[November 30, 2012]

Thief Steals Thief's Identity, SubscriberWise Reveals

"Apparently, criminal minds do think alike," said David Howe, president of SubscriberWise. "Although the cliché was proved true today, I couldn't be more pleased that SubscriberWise, once again, exposed another criminal folly before an identity thief - and a complicit partner-in-crime - could dupe Massillon Cable out of more expensive programming and equipment."

"It's really just another twist from the same old story," continued Howe, also a 16-year employee and credit manager for Massillon Cable TV. "In every one of the situations, there is always at least one unpaid account when the attempt is made to obtain a 'new' account by masquerading identity information that was stolen from another individual. Usually the crime victim is the minor child of a delinquent subscriber. Often it's an identity hijacked from an individual who is deceased. But this scenario is not nearly as typical. In fact, it's only the second time that I can confirm a service request was made with identity information from an individual who also happened to be behind bars at the very moment the application was processed at the call center.

"In this situation, SubscriberWise generated a federally compliant 'Red Flag' indicating an 'address mismatch alert,'" explaied Howe. "It's hardly an uncommon alert for our industry because it's triggered when the service address provided does not match indicative information contained in the SubscriberWise report. This is a common occurrence because people asking for service have often recently moved into a different residence and the new address is not yet reported. However, after I processed the social security number through the SubscriberWise decision management system, a previously stored record was instantly located from 2010 that matched exactly the same identity of the individual who made the service request yesterday. And because SubscriberWise maintains detailed information about previous decisions, a manager is able to leverage information that would have otherwise been missing or unknown.

"And that's exactly what happened here," explained Howe. "Because of the stored SubscriberWise reports, we were able to immediately compare the service requests based on exact date and time-stamps recorded with near atomic precision in the decision management system. After only a few seconds of an audio audit of the two service requests it was apparent this was a possible identity fraud. A search of public records and a visit from the police confirmed our suspicion."

An edited audio file of the scenario can be heard by clicking (listener discretion advised):

http://www.subscriberwise.com/media/Jailer.wav (audio with jailer)

http://www.subscriberwise.com/media/Suspect.wav (audio with suspect - listener discretion advised)

About SubscriberWise

The nation's leading provider of risk and decision analytics for the communications industry, SubscriberWise® employs enhanced Subscriber Level Segmentation technology to precisely identify credit-challenged subscribers to ultra-high achievers to maximize sales and increase profits.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]