Send would-be id thieves to jail: Tories
Convicted credit card thief agrees
Chelse McKee, staff
Joseph Smith (name changed) was convicted of identity theft a little more than a year ago but received a light punishment of an 18-month conditional sentence. Last week the Tory government proposed a new legislation which would result in harsher punishment for people like Smith.
Smith became involved with theft while working at a Domo gas station. He was approached by some men with an offer to “make some extra money.” One of the men who approached him gave him a specialized card swiper, a small, handheld device. The swiper can be bought at a cheap price anywhere on the Internet, Smith said. All that he had to do was run the card through the swiper and all the banking information would be taken from the magnetic strip.
“From how they were talking, they had been doing this for awhile,” Smith said. “They’ve done it to other Domo employees and people randomly.”
Smith said he only took the numbers for two months, making $100 a card, although he’s pretty sure that the other man made $20,000 a card.
Smith was caught in Ontario when police found the credit card swiper in his backpack. Once they had checked the device, they found the credit card numbers. Smith made a deal with the Crown, which resulted in him serving an 18-month sentence in his community.
The Tories’ new proposal seeks to introduce new restrictions on identity theft into the Canadian Criminal Code, which would make it illegal to collect, possess, or traffic someone’s personal information, as well as the intent to sell personal account information.
Rob Nicholson, MP for Niagara Falls and a presenter of the new proposal, says that identity theft has “become especially attractive to organized criminals because it poses a low risk of detection and a chance of high financial reward.”
Currently, Nicholson said, “There are already offences in the Criminal Code that cover the misuse of another person’s identity information, such as identity fraud, personation, and forgery. But these offences generally do not cover the preliminary steps that lead up to identity fraud — the collecting, possessing, and trafficking in identity information.”
The new proposal was one of many new endeavours for the Tories, accompanying others like a national anti-drug strategy, a new legislation designated to strengthen the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and new legislation to end conditional sentences for serious crimes like personal injury offences.
Even still, Smith says, he agrees with the Tories’ new proposal.
“Identity theft is a huge thing,” he said. “I think, to me, a year and a half, especially for a younger person, [even] a year to two years in jail; it’s going to straighten you up. It’s a major deal and a lot of people have had it happen to them. So the tougher punishment does make sense. You got to try and stop them somehow.”
“Identity theft has become a major issue and there need to be measures to protect people’s identity from being stolen,” said Greg Salinger, the finance minister for Manitoba. “We think it’s moving in the right direction. We have to make sure that the penalties that are inflicted on people, if they are convicted, are proportionate to the crime. The penalties have to make sure that people can’t profit off [identity theft].”
There was no mention as to how the introduction of new charges and legislation would affect the number of inmates currently serving in Canadian Correctional Institutions. According to Lynn Brunette, a media relation’s officer for the Correctional Service of Canada, there are, as of November 2007, 21,822 federal offenders in correctional institutions, 13,000 incarcerated inmates under federal jurisdiction, and 8,000 federal offenders in the community.
Justice Canada could not be reached for comment on how they plan to combat the issue of possibility of overpopulation in correctional institutions.
According to the Better Business Bureaus, identity theft costs Canadian consumers and businesses more than $2 billion annually.
