John L. Smith; Las Vegas Review Journal; May 30, 2004
Credit cards are as much a part of the American lifestyle as cheeseburgers and traffic jams. In a few short generations, we've gone from a nation that prided itself on paying its own way to one whose citizens now knit their eyebrows at rubes who pay for groceries with greenbacks...
For years, I treated credit cards with the suspicion of a chimp given a plastic banana. The prospect of volunteering to pay interest high enough to make Louie the Loan-shark blush did that to me. I carried spending money in my front pocket and paid in cash wherever I went.
About the time I realized you can't buy a house with the money in your jeans, I started to warm up to the concept of credit. Eventually, my fears were allayed and I started using a credit/debit card.
At first, I told myself it was only for emergencies and for car rentals and the like. But in no time, I was whipping out the plastic to buy a venti drip at Starbucks.
Like other people, the Smiths have their share of credit card debt. The prospect of paying high interest each month is nauseating, but perhaps the only thing worse than credit card debt is the knowledge someone else is responsible for it.
Which brings me to the underappreciated, but very American stories of Petru Dragoi and Florin "Tony" Iancu, who recently were indicted along with members of their well-oiled criminal organizations in separate credit card identity theft cases. They are alleged to have maintained their standing in the illegal community through the use of threats, assault and homicide.
But they don't take American Express.
Actually, they're accused of taking credit cards of several types from unsecured fitness center locker rooms and parking lots in Las Vegas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Omaha, Neb., and elsewhere and of using beards to rip off thousands from casinos and ATM machines. Nearly two dozen people have been indicted so far, and authorities contend more than $1 million has been stolen.
Operating out of glorified mobile satellite offices, their system was simple genius. After ripping off credit cards, they created convincing but counterfeit driver's licenses in the names of the cardholders. The face on the license belonged to a runner for the organization, who traveled from location to location until the card was exhausted.
They moved across state lines and local jurisdictions with alacrity, which has made them difficult to identify and harder to catch.
But their system and that dollar figure doesn't begin to tell the real story of the identity theft epidemic and its links to new-age organized crime.
If you think it's only a white-collar crime tale without real victims, think again. Beyond the havoc these teams generate for millions of Americans, there's a more disturbing element that harkens to a not-so-distant past.
These groups don't need a gun to make a fortune, but they're not shy about using one to protect their turf. Witness the January 2002 shooting death of Ghorghe Bogdan, alleged to have been carried out by rival gang member Rouben Kirakossian, as one of several violent examples.
It might go by another name, but this smacks of traditional mob activity, albeit with a new millennium twist. Romanian, Armenian, Russian and Yugoslavian criminals have added credit card identity theft to their repertoire of felony pursuits in Southern Nevada and show little sign of slowing down.
Why would they? According to the Federal Trade Commission, identity theft cost the nation's economy an estimated $50 billion in 2002 and touched 10 million Americans. That's a lot of money and headaches.
With an increasing emphasis on homeland security issues and combating violent crime, the slick, speedy credit card punchout artists have all but operated with impunity. That's changing as law enforcement and the public learn more about the depth of the identity theft scourge.
Whether the citizenry ought to be so addicted to its credit cards is a nonissue. Fact is, we are, and this new mob knows it.
The least we can do is make it tougher for them to score and more painful when they get caught.
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