NJ ringleader of ID theft, that reached from northern New Jersey to U.S. territories in the Pacific, fraud ploy admits guilt.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — The leader of an identity theft and fraud ring has pleaded guilty in a scheme that federal authorities said operated as a veritable "crime superstore" that reached from northern New Jersey to U.S. territories in the Pacific.

Sang-Hyun "Jimmy" Park admitted in federal court in Newark on Monday that he had helped people fraudulently obtain credit cards, bank accounts and loans using illegally obtained Social Security numbers in a scheme that federal authorities say defrauded various credit card companies, banks and lenders out of about $4 million.

Fifty-three other people — most of them, like Park, Korean immigrants living in New Jersey or New York — were charged in September 2010.

Prosecutors said Park and his co-conspirators operated a scheme to buy Social Security cards from brokers who fraudulently obtained them from Asian immigrants — mostly Chinese nationals — working in American territories, including Guam, American Samoa and Saipan.

The cards were then resold to Korean immigrants in the territorial U.S. who used them to apply for driver's licenses in California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nevada, New York and elsewhere. Several of the defendants then used their U.S. identifications to apply for credit cards. Some used all the credit they obtained to buy luxury goods such as vehicles, designer bags or liquor, some of it to resell.

Park, a 45-year-old native of South Korea, lives in Palisades Park, a town just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan that is home to a large Korean population. He emigrated from Seoul in 1999 to start a business importing raw materials from Central America to manufacture hats in New Jersey, according to his attorney, Christian Fleming.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Park took a $100,000 family loan against his mother's house in South Korea to keep his business afloat. It had slowed and faltered in the wake of the attacks, largely because of tightened U.S. restrictions on imported goods, Fleming said. Park turned to the illegal enterprise, according to his lawyer, out of desperation to try to repay his debts.

"That's what led to this," Fleming said. "He feels a lot of shame and accepts full responsibility, and that's why he wanted to plead guilty."

Michael Ward, special agent in charge of the FBI's Newark division, and Paul Fishman, U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, said Park headed a sophisticated criminal enterprise that made millions of dollars in profits and went to great efforts to conceal itself from U.S. authorities.

Park ran the operation by using shell businesses, advertising the sale of U.S. identity documents in local Korean-language newspapers and employing a staff that included identity document brokers, people who worked to increase credit limits and boost scores for customers using the fraudulently obtained credit cards and local merchants who would swipe the cards at their businesses to get banks to transmit them money, according to court documents.

"Sang-Hyun 'Jimmy' Park was the head of a New Jersey crime conglomerate which advertised, facilitated and supported a multitude of frauds resulting in staggering economic losses," Ward said.

The five counts to which Park pleaded guilty could carry up to 70 years in prison when he is sentenced in April.

Another defendant, Ho K. Yu, known as Edmund, also admitted his role in the scheme Monday in Newark federal court. The 59-year-old Tenafly resident pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting financial institutions. Those counts could carry up to 30 years each.

Prosecutors said Yu fraudulently obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars in commercial loans for customers or falsely built up credit scores for them. His attorney, Robert Stahl, said he had entered the business thinking it was a legitimate enterprise to help people obtain credit but continued working there after he found out it was not. Stahl said his client had accepted responsibility for his actions by pleading guilty.

Also Tuesday, 37-year-old Yu-Je Jo, of Cliffside Park, was sentenced in Trenton federal court to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty in the case.

The U.S. attorney's office said several other defendants had pleaded guilty to various offenses in the case.

An Identity Theft Nightmare

(CBS)  Almost 10 million Americans were victims of identity theft last year. And the recent revelation of a major security breach at the private data broker ChoicePoint has focused even more attention on the growing problem.

Few people know more about identify theft than John Harrison. In an ironic twist, when the president of ChoicePoint wrote a book on identity theft, he went to Harrison.

The Connecticut salesman has spent over 2,000 hours trying to reclaim his life after having his identity stolen, and his home office has become a shrine to the suffering, reports CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts.

"I had to come up with a filing system,'' says Harrison of his efforts to clear his name.

Harrison was a victim nearly four years ago, when a 20-year-old stole his identity and literally went for a ride.

"Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, JC Penny, two cars from Ford, a Harley, a Kawasaki motorcycle," says Harrison, listing off the purchases made in his name. "About $265,000 in four months."

Police arrested and prosecuted the thief, Jerry Phillips, and he even went to prison for three years.

"Sorry. You know, I wish I could make it up to you,'' Phillips said of his wrongdoing.

With an apologetic theif behind bars, Harrison thought he was lucky -- but was he wrong. Despite letters from the Justice Department confirming that he was a victim, Harrison and millions of others are still being harassed by creditors. In fact, he remains nearly $140,000 in debt.

"It keeps coming," says Harrison. "It keeps coming and you don't have a choice but to deal with it."

Some suggestions for victims of identity theft include:

File a police report immediately

Contact the 3 major credit bureaus -- and your creditors

Keep records of all transactions

Hire an attorney

Eric Gertler, an identity theft expert, says that Harrison's experience reflects the unfairness of the whole system.

"The problem with identity theft is that once you're a victim you're guilty until proven innocent," says Gertler. "You need to go to the financial institution and prove to them that you're not just some other deadbeat trying to get away with not paying your bills."

John Harrison followed all the rules.

"I was in a corner. I had already done everything the law told me I should be doing. And it didn't work,'' he says.

He says the many victims whose identities were compromised by ChoicePoint can expect "the same thing."

What angers John Harrison is that he followed all the rules and finds himself in debt because of a thief, and a bad thief at that. In fact, on one of the forged checks, Harrison's name was spelled incorrectly.

"He didn't have to be bright to steal your identification, but you have to be perfect to stop him?" asked Pitts.

"Absolutely, you have to be more than perfect."

Harrison's advice, before you ever become a victim, check your credit report frequently.

Three New Ways to Protect Your Identity in 2012

Justine Rivero, Contributor

Don’t start 2012 as the victim of identity theft.


It’s a $37 billion crime that affects 1 in 25 Americans, with the average victim suffering $631 in out-of-pocket costs, reports Javelin Strategy & Research. Identity theft and fraud has become more difficult to detect and resolve in recent years, resulting in even higher consumer costs.
Your bank account isn’t the only casualty of identity theft and fraud; time is another significant cost. The average identity fraud case will cost a consumer 33 hours to resolve—equivalent to more than four work days.
Whether or not you think you are susceptible, it takes just a few easy entry points for thieves to discover your personal information and abuse it at your expense. If you use mobile banking, social networking sites (such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn), shop online, access Wi-Fi in public areas, discard sensitive documents like bill statements without using a paper shredder, pay your bills via traditional mail, or hand off your credit card at a restaurant, you’re already at high risk of identity theft. While that sounds extreme, it’s the reality of how vulnerable we are as consumers.
Don’t wait until you’re a victim to take action against identity theft and fraud. You can protect your finances and quality of life this year by taking the following key steps.

1)    Get credit monitoring. According to Javelin, consumers opening new financial accounts in 2012 may be responsible for nearly half of the total cost of identity fraud. This is primarily due to the fact that new accounts take longer to detect, which leads to higher consumer costs than other types of fraud.

How: The old way of checking your credit was to manually pull your credit report, which you can do for free through AnnualCreditReport.com. The new way is to use a credit monitoring service that automatically reviews your credit report on a daily basis to monitor for any changes. The longer identity theft and fraud goes undetected, the more time and money you’ll suffer trying to resolve your case; detecting suspicious activity or fraudulent accounts as soon as possible allows you report these red flags immediately and cut your losses. The three major credit bureaus offer credit monitoring services that range from $120 to $180 a year. For a hassle-free, no-cost alternative, CreditKarma.com recently launched a new, free credit monitoring service that monitors your credit report on a daily basis and notifies you via email if a significant change is detected. Credit monitoring is one of the best safeguards against identity theft and fraud, and for the first time, it’s totally free.
2)     Switch to a smart card. While most credit cards and some debit cards offer zero liability fraud protection, identity fraud will still cost consumers an average out-of-pocket cost of $631 and 33 hours to resolve. A better measure than protection after fraud occurs is to prevent fraud in the first place with a more secure payment method. New “smart cards”, credit cards embedded with EMV microchip technology, have stronger fraud protection than traditional magnetic strip credit cards. Smart cards require the cardholder’s unique PIN—rather than, say, an easy-to-forge signature—to use it, and the encrypted microchip makes it much more difficult to counterfeit.
How: The U.S is slow to adopt smart cards, which are already the fast-growing payment standard in Europe, because of the high cost to upgrade merchant card terminals to accept the new technology. However, major credit card issuers are slowly making the switch by pushing merchants to support smart cards in 2012. Wells Fargo, Chase, U.S. Bank, and several credit unions partnered with Fiserv have already begun introducing smart cards with dual features of both the EMV microchip and the traditional magnetic strip. Inquire at your bank or issuer if they offer cards with an EMV chip; the more consumers request it, the more pressure it puts on financial institutions to meet the demand for new technology.

3) Lock down your smartphone. Your phone is essentially a one-stop shop for your data and, if stolen or exposed to thieves, can compromise your identity and financial accounts. Even if you don’t use mobile banking or financial apps, your phone could store sensitive data from online shopping, social networking and more. An unsecured phone poses a major security risk that is vulnerable everywhere you go.

How: Here’s a quick five minute checklist of how to protect your data from identity thieves by securing your mobile phone:

• Password-protect your phone with a complex and unique password, and set your phone to auto-lock. Also, make sure any mobile banking or financial apps have passwords that are not auto-saved on your phone.
• Enable a service with remote tracking, and in the event your phone is stolen will remotely lock your phone and erase its data. You can also set your phone to automatically wipe your data if your phone password is inputted incorrectly several times.
• Turn Bluetooth off if you’re not using it. Thieves can pair their Bluetooth device with yours and hack personal information.
• Be careful on Wi-Fi networks, another channel for thieves to remotely access your data undetected. Only connect your phone to secure networks with passwords.
• Before downloading any apps to your phone, always do a quick search to make sure it comes from a legitimate site or publisher. Check user reviews on sites like appWatchdog for any complaints.

In the worst case scenario that you suspect you may be a victim of identity theft and fraud, follow the Department of Homeland Security’s steps of what to do if your personal information is compromised.
Remember that your financial accounts, mobile phone and credit cards don’t have built-in protections to keep you and your identity safe. It’s up to you to take these three key steps to protect your identity in 2012.


Justine Rivero is the Credit Advisor for CreditKarma.com, a free credit management website that helps nearly 3.5 million consumers access their truly free credit score and free credit monitoring.


I can help in restoring your identity.

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Denison pair face charge of Identity Theft, using false names

HARLAN -- Two Denison individuals face felony charges today in Shelby County District Court for Identity Theft in separate incidents.

Maria Guadalupe Valle, 27, 802 13th Ave. S #12, and Joel Valdez Flores, 201 Chamberlian Dr. #3, both are scheduled to appear on the charge in district court today, Tuesday, Dec. 20.

If convicted of the class D felony, they each face up to five years in jail with additional fines totaling $5,000.

According to a complaint filed in court, Valle collected wages at the Shelby County Cookers plant in Harlan in 2011 and before in excess of $1,000 under a false identity. Valle allegedly used the name Angela Mai Sepulveda, who had her purse stolen from a store parking lot in 2000.

Flores also collected wages in excess of $1,000 at the Cookers plant in 2011 and before, using the identity of Davidi Marez, who had his identification stolen from his residence in Texas in 2008. His identity has been used to gain wages by fraud since that time.



This will only grow.   Protect yourself
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The Silent Crime — Identity Theft

This is an article from Lynn Lionhood:

The Silent Crime — Identity Theft

It may even be the hardest to prosecute. Countless people have asked, “Who would want my identity?” or stated, “If they want to be me, then let them.” Frankly speaking, that’s a dangerous perspective. If you believe that identity theft can only affect your finances, you’re wrong. The impact of identity theft on the lives of those who’ve had their indentities stolen is devastating. Through our extensive research, we have concluded that identity theft consists of three categories: financial, medical and character, or what some call criminal. According to data from the Consumer Sentinel and Identity Theft Clearing House published in February 2009, financial losses from credit cards and bank fraud amount to less than half of the reported cases, which leaves us all vulnerable to countless other schemes.

Let’s begin with defining identity theft. The FTC’s definition is: “Identity theft occurs when someone possesses or uses your name, address, Social Security number (SSN), bank or credit card account number, or other identifying information without your knowledge with the intent to commit fraud or other crimes.” Now, let’s break this definition down to the three categories that, in our opinion, are at greatest risk: financial losses, medical files and procedures, and character attacks that most often take shape as criminal actions by another in your good name.

The first form of identity theft is that of your financial credit. Simply put, it is the stealing of your identity for your money. Credit card fraud is the most common form, at 28% of all cases, followed by bank fraud at 18%. The criminal will set up accounts in your name using alternative addresses, use your existing bank account at another branch (with the drivers license he or she obtained in your name with his or her picture), borrow money on your home, buy a car or furniture in another town, drain your online stockbrokerage accounts; the list is endless.

Secondly, there is medical identity theft. Most of us overlook this criminal aspect. This occurs in numerous ways: employees of hospitals copying your files for personal information; others using your Social Security number to have procedures like surgery or even an AIDS/HIV test; or checking into the emergency room under your name so they can kindly pass on the cost directly to you. Another reason may be to obtain an elderly person’s insurance, Medicare/Medicaid or prescription drug benefits. Imagine if you went to your pharmacist, and they told you your prescription was already filled in a neighboring community, and they could not fill it again.

Finally, there is character identity theft, where employment fraud tops the FTC list at 13% of total cases, followed closely by criminal acts being committed in your name. One day, you may wake up to a knock on your door by the sheriff’s department arresting you for an outstanding warrant in your name for crimes committed in another state.

There are many stories more frightening than the ones above. The point is, there are many forms of identity theft and many more to arise from this multibillion dollar criminal industry. If you have never experienced the long-term consequences of being a victim, then you may not realize the need for proper insurance or protection.

Let me help you in protection.    Contact me:  www.legalshield.com/hub/taylor_ra