Stolen identity

Be on time. Work hard. Have fun. Treat customers well. And please … deposit your paycheck quickly.

That could pass as the new job description for employees at Sonic Burrito.

Several months ago a worker folded her paycheck, zipped it inside her daypack, locked her car door and left. It was college finals week and she had plenty else to think about.

Later, a thief smashed her car window and grabbed her bag. Just like that, she lost her books, her iPod music player and some other stuff. She called Crime Check to file a report and asked Sonic Burrito owner Melissa Massie to stop payment on the check and issue a new one.

Two weeks later, Massie made a discovery while balancing her books.

She uses purple-colored checks to buy food to make some of the best burritos in town, pay her utility bills and meet payroll for her 15 employees. But as she reviewed a batch of checks drawn on her account, she came across two light-blue ones that didn’t even bear her signature and misspelled Spokane in the address line.

“I’m like, what are these?” she said.

It was her first brush with check fraud and identity theft, a growing problem that last year touched about 700 people in Spokane, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report.

Police say the cost to businesses is more than $1 million a month in Spokane.

The crime of identity theft is gaining notoriety as more people become victims and companies suffer security blunders, such as the recent Bank of America disclosure that it has lost data tapes containing personal information on 1.2 million federal employees, including Social Security numbers and information about their charge cards. Also in recent weeks, data collection company ChoicePoint Inc. said it may have allowed criminals to view the personal information of 145,000 Americans.

The Federal Trade Commission reports that 635,000 people nationwide complained last year that they were victims of fraud and identity theft. The cost: $547 million.

Such crimes in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, where 81 people reported they were victims last year, are fueled by a stubborn drug problem. Methamphetamine addicts are turning innocent acts — such as forgetting a purse at a restaurant, or leaving letters for the mail carrier, or locking a daypack inside a car — into a crime template, say police and businesses.

It doesn’t take much effort. All that’s needed is an account number, a name, access to a computer and printer, and blank check paper stock available from just about any office supply store.

That’s what happened to Massie. Of the two bogus checks cashed, one passed muster at Wal-Mart and the other at Bank of America.

Together the checks totaled about $1,000. But it could have been much worse.

Last week, police Detective Stacey Carr used a search warrant to check out a storage locker rented by a reputed methamphetamine user and identity thief.

After a worker snipped the padlock, Carr methodically thumbed through bags and boxes full of computer discs, fake identifications, counterfeit checks, computer equipment, poetry, drawings, cell phones, cords, and random paper.

As she collected evidence and put it in bags, Carr nodded at many of the items and sighed as she recounted the owner, a former prison inmate who’s about 35 years old. Though he was drug-free for several years after his release, Carr said, he has relapsed.

He goes by the street name “Jesse James,” a sad attempt to compare a Spokane drug addict to the legendary Old West outlaw.

From one athletic bag with an ironic “Marlboro” cigarette logo emblazoned on the side, Carr pulled a color copy of someone’s federal income tax return check. Then she withdrew several cell phones, a floppy disk drive, a 2-inch-thick drug manual, a Bible, several fake drivers’ licenses, rubber gloves and a pair of binoculars.

In a separate pocket, Carr found a folder and held a series of counterfeit checks under the beam of her partner’s flashlight. Attached to each other, the checks looked as if they just rolled out of a laser printer.

They were clever forgeries of legitimate checks from Allegro Escrow, a small Spokane Valley business that has been fighting counterfeit checks.

“It’s hard to keep a trust account secret,” acknowledged Allegro Escrow owner Kyle Kinyon. “Anyone you send a check to, well, it could potentially be stolen.”

He has high praise for fraud fighters within the police department, but said having four officers assigned to investigate such crimes is laughable.

“This whole fraud thing is a really an annoyance for business and a nightmare for banks,” he said. “It’s costing lots of money and lots of time.

“Something more needs to be done about it.”

Another piece of paper culled from a folder during Carr’s search contained the names, addresses, phone numbers and other personal information of employees of Benewah Community Hospital in St. Maries, Idaho.

“This isn’t good. We’ll have to find out how that happened,” said hospital official Mike Anderson upon learning of the seized paperwork.

The hospital is mindful of privacy, he said, given strict federal laws regarding access to patient information.

Similar care is taken with personal information of employees. None of the hospital’s employees have complained of identity theft, he said.

Jan Quintrall, president of the Better Business Bureau in Spokane, says laws are beginning to address the seriousness of identity theft, but not quickly enough.

“Congress should get moving on this,” she said.

She’s an advocate of the Washington law that went into effect last summer requiring businesses to truncate credit card numbers on printed receipts.

Many businesses are not in compliance, however. Quintrall suggested that if someone notices their entire credit card number is printed rather than just the last four numbers, they should call it to the attention of the business’s manager and also call the BBB.

“We’ll follow up on it and mail a letter,” she said.

She added that customers should not blame the clerks in such situations.

“It is not their fault, it is the owner’s,” Quintrall said.

While it’s law in Washington, that’s not the case in Idaho, until a federal law goes into effect next January.