Staten Island Identity Theft Snail Mail Ring Broken

A police sting has nailed 33 suspects in a Staten Island identity theft ring. The ring was a loosely affiliated group that eschewed new identity theft strategies for an old approach.

Don’t you just love the emails you get from Nigeria? You know. The ones written poorly that claim there is some obscene amount of money in a bank account that the sender wants to share with you? Yeah, those emails. Well, the Nigerians have decided to take a new tack. They are coming onshore!

The New York sting focused on 33 immigrants primarily from Nigeria. The group was known as the “BRO” network and was named after the first initial of the last name of the three main members. The group was not sending emails nor were they particularly computer efficient. How did they rip off people then? They went old school.

Identity theft has actually been with us for a long time. It was rarely mentioned because it usually only happened on a small scale. The historical strategy used was the mail snatch. Criminals would cruise along the street and swipe mail out of people’s mail boxes. They would then either resell the information or use the credit provided in the form of credit card and home equity checks to buy things. The items could then be resold to produce cash.



This is exactly what the suspects in this identity theft ring choose to do. Investigators have indicated that the suspects successfully swiped information and identities from 60 plus people. That might not sound like a huge windfall, but it doesn’t take much in an identity theft case to reap some big profits. In this case, the thieves converted the 60 into over $5 million in ill gotten gains.

What can we learn from this sting? Well, the days of having your mailbox out on the edge of the street may be over. A much smarter move is to get a door drop or rent a post office box. Doing so pretty much eliminates the possibility of getting your mail swiped by someone cruising the neighborhood.

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