Woman whose identity was stolen catches the thief after a 45 minute foot pursuit!

[thewayne]

It's a cool story. Victim is in Starbuck's. Had previously been in the bank to identify the woman in a surveillance photo that was allegedly her, said thief had an expensive coat. There, in the line in front of her, is the woman with the coat.

In the words of Moonlighting, "Cue the chase music!"

After finally being caught, the thief got a 44 day sentence that was counted as time served plus a suspended sentence. After six months of identity hell, the crook walked. Heinlein had it right: TANJ.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/15/IDTHEFT.TMP

The Slashdot thread: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/15/1220215

Comments

[deborak]

Sucks. The identity theft victim should have beat the perp to a pulp, then gotten out of trouble by blaming the violence on caffeine-fueled-rage.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The police didn't even arrest the woman who stole my parent's ID and money.

Definitely TANJ.

[silveradept]

No Justice at all. For something like that, she should have been locked up for quite some time, not given another probation. Identity theft is serious business these days.

[zentraedi-shep.livejournal.com]

Now that's a nice story... The victim should steal the other woman's ID, but then again, there nothing to gain...

ID theft seems to be a major problem in the US, isn't it? Might be connected to you guys having those checking accounts. We here in Europe mostly have electronic accounts which work with those atm machines. As long as you watch for certain things like there's noone or no cam watching and there's no extra card reader attached to the machine, these things tend to be pretty safe, since banks are really hard to hack nowadays. There is OF COURSE ID theft here too, but not as much as is reported from the US...