A large and organised identity theft operation using printers has been discovered in Portland after a routine vehicle stop-and-search.
Pamplinmedia reported that 43-year-old Paul Arthur Herbert was arrested for “several counts of identity theft and possession of a forged instrument”, and police also arrested 42-year-old Jennifer Lynn Coffman, a suspected homeless person, for the same crime as well as possession of methamphetamine, and found that there were warrants out for her in Multnomah and Clackamas Counties.
After searching a hotel room in Lake Oswego, police discovered the scale of the operation, and Sergeant Mike Francis said: “The patrol guys who made the stop put together from an interview that that’s where they’d been staying and from other investigative resources, they learned there were possibly drugs in the room. They already knew they were dealing with identification thieves and probably more in the hotel room.”
The room had been paid for with stolen credit cards, and drugs were also seized along with items paid for with stolen cards, stolen identities and luggage. Evidence of the identity thefts included forged drivers’ licences and credit cards, and nearly 300 victims are thought to be affected. He also said that the identity thefts appeared to be new cases that had not yet been reported, as “these are all going to be new victims. The suspects had a printer with them. They were making IDs as they go”.
Francis said that this was part of a long term operation: “Right now we don’t have a real good sense of how long. They’ve obviously been doing thefts for a long time, that part is clear. They had only been at the hotel for a night or two, so their movement prior to that is unknown. And because they’re using fake IDs to check in and pre-paid cards to pay for them, we probably won’t be able to determine a record of movement.”
Source data was also discovered which can be used to steal a person’s identity, which is “everything you would need to open a credit card. There’s a lot of ways that information gets out — there’s the dark web where people purchase information, and other drug users will trade information for drugs. So if I worked in a financial institution where I have access and take out a smartphone, capture the screens that have all the info and trade it for a little bit of meth, now you have a data breach”.
Francis advised potential victims: “Don’t call us because you suspect being a victim or have been a victim. That will take us away from actually being able to contact the victims. We will go through all of the information and names we have, and we will contact people to verify that it’s their information and determine if they’ve been a victim of identification theft.”