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Identifying Identity Theft

In April 2009 I was invited to address the subject of identity theft at a United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice meeting in Vienna. The subject cropped up again this year at the 32nd International Symposium on Economic Crime at Jesus College Cambridge in early September. In Vienna, I was afforded a five-minute slot to say all I know about identity theft. This gave me just enough time to say that there is a lot of identity theft out there, and it is very difficult to do anything about it. The assembled nations nodded sagely as the simultaneous translation filtered through their headphones, and carried on consulting their Blackberrys. At Cambridge, a more generous allowance of 10 minutes allowed slightly more opportunity for me to expatiate on an old and intractable problem. The UN Handbook on Identity-related Crime, which was the product of various meetings and symposia over several years, runs to a mere 337 pages, of which the first 50-odd pages discuss ‘Legal Approaches to Criminalise Identity Theft’. The devotion of so much text to one sub-species of a criminal dishonesty offence on its own suggests that the issues involved are very complex, and solutions will be hard to find. The chapter contains a number of definitions of identity theft, including: