identifier. A measure that would do just that has been introduced in Congress and defeated several times. It won't help me or anyone my age or older, but it will ensure that the number will be more secure for my kids and grandchildren.
We also have to force credit-granting agencies to require more identification and buttress their credit card policies. We need to restrict the selling of personal information by credit bureaus, state and federal agencies, and marketing firms. The federal government has to take this issue up - and soon. If it doesn't do something, so many people are going to be running around claiming to be the same person that we won't know who anyone is.
WHERE THERE'S A WILL
In a world of wolves and sheep, I look on myself as a sheep dog. I try to make people think about things. Fraud, as it continues to grow, will really test our society. It will challenge us to decide, what is enough? We've come to tolerate fake luggage and an occasional fraudulent purchase assigned to our credit card, but now, with our very selves being stolen, it's getting to crunch time.
Twenty years from now, there will be entire categories of frauds that the best science fiction writer couldn't even imagine, just as decades ago no one would have imagined Internet fraud because no one imagined the Internet. As more and more gets done electronically, I think you're going to see an explosion in crimes where there's no human face you can identify. There won't be any line-ups; who are you going to line up - e-mail addresses?
There is an undeniable appeal of scams. I understand that better than anymore. When you discover the way they work, it's like being taken backstage at a magic show. But scams aren't entertainment. They gnaw at the fabric of society and ruin lives. We have to look at white-collar crime as being every bit as dangerous as armed robbery.
Every day, I hear of a new fraud. I recently learned of a famous soccer star who never uses his real signature to sign checks or business documents, because so many people know his autograph that thieves are continually forging his signature. So he signs checks by printing his initials. He's lost his signature to crooks.
I was talking to a highway patrol officer in Tennessee who specializes in automobile fraud, and he told me there are roughly twelve million classified ads run each year in the United States for used cars. About three-quarters of them are believed to have been placed by "curbstoners." Curbstoners are con artists who buy wrecked cars and cosmetically repair them and sell them as if they're new, or else buy leased vehicles that are only a couple of years old, but have maybe a hundred thousand miles on them. They roll back the odometers to 29,000 miles and sell them for much more than they paid. They're called curbstoners, because if you reply to their ad, they make a point to come to you and sell you the car at the curb outside your house or office. The curbstoners are slick. They always have a story: "I just had my first kid, so I've got to sell this Honda so I can get a station wagon." It's become an enormous problem, because the titles are forged and it's nearly impossible to trace these crooks. And when I hear that three-quarters of the classified ads for cars are frauds, that tells me there's no way I'd ever respond to one.
I read about con artists who scan newspapers for pleas for lost dogs. They call up the distraught owners and tell them they found their pet while they were traveling and took it home with them before learning of its true home. They offer to ship the dog to them as soon as they wire the airfare. People are so ecstatic to hear that their dog has been found, they send the money.
On and on it goes, but we don't take it seriously. Once, as a TV demonstration, I went up to a cashier at the express lane of a Kroger's store and used the store manager's driver's license to cash a check. The store manager obviously had a different name. I'm white. He was black. Why bother to ask for an ID if you're not going to take it seriously?
We sorely need stiffer penalties and real jail time for white-collar criminals. I think it's ridiculous that if I have drugs on me I'll get five or ten years in prison, but if I rip off $20 million I'll probably get probation. I'll give you another solution that I've been propagating without success for years. Companies don't care enough about losses from fraud, because in most cases they can deduct a hundred percent of their losses from their income taxes. By lowering their taxes, that write-off cuts their losses significantly. Well, if Congress passed a law that said from now on businesses can deduct only half of their losses from fraud, companies would wake up and get much more proactive and fraud would decline. But who's going to introduce such a bill, and who would vote for it?
One thing we can do without any legislation is teach our kids better ethics. I was talking with a top executive of a big company, and he told me something his teenage son confided to him. After school lets out, his son gathers with his friends in the parking lot and they take out their homework sheets. They look at the math assignment and divvy it up: "You do problems 1 - 5, you do 6 - 10, I'll do 11 - 15. And then we can e-mail each other the answers." It was a sobering discovery. The executive told his son, "You get an A for creativity and a D for not learning anything."
I heard about high school students at another school who were counterfeiting tickets to the annual school musical and selling them. There's hardly any money involved - but it's the thrill of the scam. Otherwise decent kids are being corrupted, because it all seems so harmless. It's not about lawbreaking as much as beating the system. Everyone wants to get from point A to point B as quickly as they can.
I'm not trying to overly scare you. I don't like habitually skeptical people, and it's not my desire to breed a country of paranoid citizens. But in this land of milk and money, I've seen too many cons, come across too many phony products, watched too many slick pitches. Once you become a victim of a major fraud, your whole life changes. It takes the average person two years to clear his or her credit once it's been corrupted. And it may take a lifetime to recover from the emotional anguish.
You need to start looking at the world the way I do, with eyes wide open. Ask me when fraud will stop and the answer is never. Fraud has become one of the constants of life. To bet against its continued inroads without action being taken is a sucker's bet. We have to decide: Do we take control of fraud, or does fraud take control of us? We have the might to reduce fraud. The question is, do we have the will?