Identity theft is getting truly nasty. In this case a woman who had apparently breaking into corporate accounts and stealing identities as well as dollars, was killed by three men who wanted her laptop and likely the cash stream the identity thefts were generating.
According to a couple of stories out of Long Beach, Calif., a woman, Ginie Samayoa, allegedly was using her laptop to access a number of unidentified corporate computer systems and stealing credit card numbers. Police say she apparently wasn't taking tons of cash, or at least not enough that anyone had caught on.
According to the Contra Costa Times: "Investigators know she tapped into corporate accounts with balances of $100,000. Using the numbers, she made purchases of about $2,000 so she did not draw any attention. The companies likely paid the bills, not realizing they were being ripped off, police said."
Exactly how she ended up with the three men charged with her murder is unclear but on Jan. 30 one of them shot her and took her laptop. She died the next day.
Police have since recovered her computer and arrested the men. According to the Contra Costa story, computer experts at a Los Angeles Police Department laboratory checked Samayoa's files and to see what the men were after, and what she was up to.
"She's been doing it for a while. A couple of years," police said. "These guys wanted that computer."
California was in the Federal Trade Commission's Top 10 worst states for identity theft this year. In fact that report found for the ninth year in a row identity theft - particularly in Arizona and California -- was the number one consumer complaint filed with the FTC in 2008.
Let's hope they don't have to start counting murders attributable to id theft any time soon.
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