DISQUS

bmenezes · 3 years ago

Only 65 charged with ID theft yeesterday Kind of interesting that only 65 of the 1,282 rounded up yesterday actually were charged with ID theft or another criminal count; the rest were held on administrative immigration law violations, according to  AP. Makes it look as if the whole exercise used ID theft as a pretext for what in the end amounted to a sweep designed primarily to net undocumented workers. Either that, or ICE's evidence for charging more of them with ID theft was so shaky, they had to fall back on immigration violations alone, which again renders the ID theft crackdown a sham.

But it does raise the question: If only 65 people were caught with provably stolen IDs, what was the documentation Swift used in employing the rest, who also allegedly are illegal? Something's fishy, and it ain't the beef byproducts...

Andrew Oh-Willeke · 3 years ago

Press accounts also suggest that even those facing criminal charges did not themselves "steal" anyone's identity, even though they may have received or purchased a name and social security number that belongs to someone else.

Indeed, in all likelihood, many of those charged with identity theft had no personal knowledge of the precise means by which the documents they used to obtain employment were generated (e.g. from a dead person, made up from scratch, from a friend or relative of the provider who consented to the use of their name and social security number, or from someone who did not consent to the use of their name and social security number).  In many cases they probably didn't know if they were or were not using another non-consenting person's identity until charged with identity theft.