On the hunt for ID thieves

This report airs Dateline NBC Sunday, July 22, 7 p.m.

Chris Hansen Correspondent • Profile

It happens so often TV commercials joke about it: a faceless stranger is able to get a hold of your credit card and go to town.

But for real people, it’s no joke at all.

Leigh Morton, ID theft victim: This was cash out of my checking account. And it was  just gone.

Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent: All of it gone?

Morton: All of it.

Leigh Morton woke up one Sunday morning and decided to log on to check her bank account.

Morton: I was checking  to see if I could afford to go out to dinner and I had no money.

Hansen: No money?

Morton: No money.

On Dateline, we’ll put a face on a world-class crime and track down people actually involved in schemes to steal your identity—involved in crimes that add up to billions.

Craig Magaw, U.S. Secret Service, in charge of criminal investigations: It’s huge out there ..

Magaw is in charge of criminal investigations at the U.S. Secret service which fights identity theft. He says there was a time when crooks would get your credit card number by stealing a purse or digging in the trash.

Hansen: 15, 20 years ago, we worried about tearing up the carbons of our credit cards

Magaw: Exactly. Dumpster diving.

Hansen: Now?

Magaw: Now, with technology, the criminals are able to hack into corporations, financial institutions, and get much larger amounts of information data.

Hansen: Hi-tech dumpster diving.

Magaw: You could call it that.

And, thanks to the Internet, once the thieves have your card number, they’re off on an online shopping spree with your money.

It happens once every 4 seconds, thousands of times a day, millions of times a year: That’s how many times experts estimate there’s a phony charge made with a stolen credit card number.

Steven Yu: I heard a lot about identity fraud. But I never expect that happens to me.

Restaurant owner Steven Yu says he’s been fighting with his bank for more than 8 months. After he woke up one morning, he discovered his account was overdrawn.

Hansen: So somebody was out there using your debit card number?

Yu: Correct.

In the end, Steven Yu says the bank tried to hold him responsible for more than $400 in charges he says he never made, even sending a debt-collector after him.

Hansen: So you’re being treated like the criminal that these people actually are.

Yu: Yes.

It’s an experience neither Steven Yu nor Leigh Morton would wish on anyone.

Morton: It felt as bad as if somebody had raped me, only financially.  It was that devastating to me personally.

When you hear stories like those, it makes you want to track down the thieves, find out how they steal your identity, and confront them face to face.

On Dateline, we’re going to take you along on an undercover investigation that start at a computer keyboard and travel across America and around the world.

It’s a year-long probe into what’s become a massive, multi-billion dollar, global problem.

We’ll show you exactly how the crooks swipe your identity. And, once they have it, how fast and how much they can steal, as  we try to catch a new kind of Internet predator— the identity thieves.

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