When I read this all I could do was shake my head, but at the same time almost admire their ingenuity and abject laziness by writing scripts to translate the data... Probably courtesy of Google.

Or at least for some time now it seems fairly obvious. Now eBay again so you want to buy , half a cheese sandwich, pet food(pets dead sell it's food), carpet pieces (a little smelly but still good), or old postcards from vacation in the upper pa of Michigan ebays the place new try our direct ID theft hotline to France translation included. Try to learn no more fleabay or wheelie chair, >KZEERRRRT< got it.

Scared that not only the 1.8bn English speaking ne'er do wells will buy your credit card info? Not to mention if (when) they translate it into Chinese!

EAfH

(...or is it just too early in the morning?)

... we should be concentrating on the real problem.

ID theft can be made much harder - but we have to recognise the problem and then drive a solution. The easiest one to fix is credit & debit card fraud after ID theft via CNP transactions. We can stop it using a number of methods, such as the GrIDsure method - detailed & discussed here in our Register - which can generate OTP instead of PIN or Pa55words.

We have the technology available, it's just the banks & APACs hiding the problem!

So is the story that someone can translate a few odd words into another language automatically (s/// being so advanced and all) or that this guy lost his details to scammers twice in a year?

I mean come on, once *maybe*, but surely after realising what a pain it is he'd have kept his eyes open for such scams. Or was he buying penis pills on the internet and that's how they got his details? Anyone wanting to take bets?... :o)

You forget that since the introduction of Chip and Pin, Liability, primarily, now lies with the retailers and you - The Banks managed to shift it from them with this introduction.

An interesting - if small - development in the world of id theft. Interesting in the sense that the theives are developing skills to market their wares.

The development I'm looking for also falls into the 'business model' realm - and that is volume transactions. So far the 'market' for stolen identities is not constrained by the protection given to those identities by government and corporate custodians. (If the general public were truly aware of how vulnerable their personal data is, they'd never use online transactions again.) Nor is the market constrained by the low skills of the thieves (no further explanation necessary but see my previous point.)

Thus far, the biggest constraint on the 'market' is the lack of a wholesaler's 'back end' - in other words, a channel that can move the many, many millions of vulnerable ids profitably. However, I don't think this will be long in coming.