Part 2 Identity Theft

IDENTITY THEFT Part 2 continued from previous post....
Banks and credit card giants, meanwhile, are routinely writing off as much as two per cent in fraudulent charges as "the cost of doing business," according to Jim Melnick, a former U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency analyst who leads geopolitical threat intelligence research at a Virginia-based consulting firm, iDEFENSE.

"The credit card companies are so powerful, they're making so much money, this is still just a nuisance," Melnick said. "But you can't hold that attitude forever because the cyberworld is completely different. There's nothing to prevent that two per cent from going to 20 as more vulnerabilities are found and more people get into the game. The (numbers) could change dramatically."

Lawyer Scott Christie is photographed in the computer room of McCarter and English in Newark, NJ. Christie was the prosecuter on Operation Firewall. "It's not a stretch to say (the financial loss) was in the hundreds of millions," he says.