A couple of weeks ago, Consumerist relayed the story of Eric Drew. While Drew battled leukemia, a lab tech figured he didn't have enough problems and stole his identity, bringing the fury of creditors scorned down on the head of a man at death's door. Eventually, Drew sued the major credit bureaus and won. It was an interesting story, but Discover Magazine posted an even more compelling version, complete with horrifying medical details and......

A Seattle-area man whose identity had been stumping the FBI has been identified with the help of his parents. The 52-year-old man had been arrested two weeks ago by federal authorities on charges of identity theft and fraud. The government had not been able to identify the man, who had been known to use over 30 aliases, because he had burned the tips of his fingers to alter his prints. The man who had......

Kurt might be amused to learn that, since 2003, at least one jackass criminal has been using his social security number to make fraudulent purchases. Said jackass has apparently skimmed some £36 million—about 5,000 million US dollars these days—from the deceased rock star's estate. "Mr. Cobain" might have continued his spending spree had he not slipped up in 2007; his purchase of a $3.2 million New Jersey mansion drew the attention of Courtney Love.......

Here are things you don't want cops to find when they search your apartment:Four computers, two printers, a scanner and an industrial machine that makes identity cards...$17,500 in cash, dozens of credit cards and fake driver's licenses, and keys to unlock many of the apartments and mailboxes in [your] upscale apartment building...a book titled "The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims," as well as a newspaper......

Here are three vaguely computer-related crimes taken from recent headlines in Seattle, Chicago and New England. Seattle: "Man pleads guilty in cybertheft case." A 35-year-old Seattle man has pleaded guilty in federal court to mail fraud and aggravated identity theft in a scheme that utilized peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to gain access to private information from dozens of victims. Gregory Kopiloff admitted during a plea hearing Monday that, through LimeWire and other file-sharing programs, he used......

Seattlest's favorite crime (just edging Identity Theft) strikes again, this time in one of Seattlest's favorite places. A copper theft at Snoqualmie Pass temporarily disabled highway signs and safety lighting, which had to suck for people navigating the pass in the middle of the night. Don't mistake the fact that copper theft is Seattlest's favorite crime with Seattlest being in favor of the crime. It's bad and dangerous and taxpayers lose. Why is it our......

Subject: Can you imagine that you are healthy? Although the dailies almost convinced us that spam as we know it has ended because Robert Alan Soloway was arrested yesterday, our inbox says otherwise. Subject: Orgasmotron It would seem that the zombie computers that Soloway has spamming away are still hard at work during his incarceration. Subject: So you asked for another message from Ms. Atkins, yeah? Or else he isn't solely responsible for the ruin......

Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books: In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry......

It was said on this site not too long ago that copper theft was Seattlest's favorite modern crime. Something about raw materials theft and the sheer weight of the score tips the scales in its favor over identity theft which is exactly the opposite end of the virtual spectrum and our second favorite crime. Ain't nothing virtual about the 15,000 feet of copper wire that was taken from a road construction project in Washington last......