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2012 Archives
South Florida is an uphill battleground for the U.S.
Secret Service fighting increasingly high-tech credit
card crime. Two men were indicted for
ripping off $600,000 from Apple stores around the
country by using counterfeit credit cards. Florida
topped the nation with 33,595 identity-theft complaints
in 2011. Hackers and credit card "skimmers" sell stolen
bank and credit-card information from unsuspecting
users, then make fake credit cards linked to real
accounts. Counterfeit-credit-card trafficking rings make
it easy for criminals to get everything online. On March
16, federal authorities busted alleged members of a
nationwide fake credit card operation on racketeering
charges. The 19 people arrested, including three men
from Florida, allegedly ran a large-scale network of
complex financial scams. It's a constant battle," said
Lynch. "[Criminals] can get on Interstate 95 and hit a
lot of places in a weekend." (Source
privateofficerbreakingnews.com)
 Northeast
Portland fencing operation busted this weekend that
employed so-called "boosters" An
apartment raided by police last week resembled a
mini-mart, with tubs of diapers, lotions, toilet paper,
shampoos and bottles of Tide detergent stacked in
closets, stashed in cardboard boxes covered with
blankets and even stuffed in drawers and shelves of a
living room entertainment center. Investigators say
they're finding these fencing operations popping up in
apartment complexes across the metro area, particularly
in east Multnomah County. They estimate this one caused
more than $200,000 a year in losses for Safeway,
Albertsons and Fred Meyer stores.
(Source
oregonlive.com)
ORC ring member in Tennessee turns herself in to police
after hitting T.J. Maxx stores in Nashville and Middle
Tennessee. Nance is believed to be one of
four suspects involved in the shoplifting ring. The
remaining three suspects are not yet in custody, police
said. (Source
tennessean.com)
Preventing Organized Retail Crime. This nine
minute video explains ORC and what retailers and law enforcement
should know about this increasing trend. The video
includes interviews with LP professionals, as well as
past crime ring members, making the video a well-rounded
look into the world of organized retail crime.
(source
cagrocers.com)
Excerpts from
GAO-11-675: Efforts to Combat Organized Retail
Crime
The U.S. Government Accountability Office ORC report
June 2011
LERPnet Provides a Mechanism to Share Data
Nationally, but Stakeholders Report That Use of the
Database by Retailers and Law Enforcement Has Been
Limited
Continued from Friday
In April 2011, LERPnet was
acquired by ISO Crime Analytics, a data-management
company with experience running large
information-sharing databases for the retail,
insurance, and banking industries. LERPnet 2.0, as
it is being called, is intended to address some of
the criticisms leveled at the original LERPnet when
it becomes operational sometime in the summer of
2011. For example, the system is to have link
analysis tools to help identify potential patterns
of criminal activity and enhanced notification
mechanisms for retailers. Additionally, ISO Crime
Analytics is planning to hire a full-time data
analyst to supplement the automatic tools. Working
with a retail advisory board of 15 to 18 members,
ISO Crime Analytics is to address standardization of
data entry, including providing uniform definitions
to aid in consistent reporting of incidents. The
company is also working to simplify data entry of
theft incidents, in part, by further enabling direct
uploads from retailers’ existing case management
systems. While the CEO of ISO Crime Analytics
acknowledged that it will take time for the alerts
to be "real-time," the goal is to get incident
information uploaded into the system as quickly as
possible to enhance alerts available to retailers
and law enforcement that want to receive them. LERPnet 2.0 will be capable of linking to other
crime databases such as the National Crime
Information Center, but the specific databases are
to be decided by the retail advisory board, which
the company said was to be formed in June 2011.
ISO Crime Analytics indicated that the system is
first and foremost a retail tool, since retailers
are the entities most responsible for identifying
stolen product, inputting incident details into
LERPnet, and using that data to make links with
other retailers and build potential ORC cases. An
FBI official responsible for coordinating ORC
investigations similarly stated that retailers are
best suited to use LERPnet to help identify patterns
of ORC activity, make links between stolen
merchandise and goods being sold online, and
identify major cases that may merit federal
involvement. For example, one retail investigator
noted that certain brands or products may be
store-specific, making individual retailers the most
appropriate stakeholder to identify which of those
products could be potentially fenced online. The FBI
official further indicated that the value of LERPnet
is in making it easier for retailers to aggregate
cases—thus demonstrating a bigger impact with a
federal nexus—and that the agency typically relies
on retailers to bring them ORC cases because of the
FBI’s limited resources and other threat priorities.
He noted that once an ORC case is presented to the
FBI for potential involvement, agents would be able
to use the FBI’s internal case management system to
identify if any other cases involving the same
criminal suspects or organizations were open
nationwide, potentially linking ORC to other crimes.
ISO Crime Analytics hopes that the new system will
also eventually be of use to local law enforcement.
For example, a company official noted that law
enforcement may benefit from retailer alerts for
areas within their jurisdiction or could potentially
match stolen goods discovered to reported thefts.
Since LERPnet 2.0 has yet to become operational, it
is unclear how widely it will be used by law
enforcement.
(Source
gao.gov)
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