Victims of identity theft falsely accused of being pedophiles

The news source This is London & the BBC report that victims of identity theft in the UK were falsely accused of being pedophiles. It is an extreme example of the destruction that identity theft can cause to people’s lives.

7,250 people were accused of downloading child pornography from the Internet in one of the UK’s biggest child pornography investigations (’Operation Ore‘). There have been, thus far, 1,451 convictions. And 39 suicides.

Now, it’s coming to light that hundreds of those accused were victims of identity theft from credit card fraud. Pete Townshend of The Who was one of those wrongly accused.

Since 2003 Operation Ore has come under closer scrutiny, and the police forces in the UK have been criticized for their poor handling of the operation. The most common criticism is that they failed to determine whether or not the owners of credit cards in Landslide’s database actually accessed any sites containing child porn, unlike in the U.S. where it was determined in advance whether or not credit card subscribers had purchased child porn. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell exposed these flaws in a series of articles in 2005 and 2007.

This was a serious error, because many of the people making charges at child porn sites were using stolen credit card information (and the police arrested the real owners of the credit cards, not the actual viewers). Plus, thousands of credit card charges were made where there was no access to a site, or access to only a dummy site. When the police finally checked, they found 54,348 occurrences of stolen credit card information in the Landslide database. The British police failed to provide this information to the defendants, and some implied that they had checked and found no evidence of credit card fraud when no such check had been done. As verified by later tracing of details, Pete Townshend of The Who and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack were among those falsely accused. [Wikipedia]

Unfortunately, for those wrongly accused, much damage has been done to their reputations – some were placed on the sex offenders’ registrar. This is an extreme example of identity theft. It serves as a caution to investigative forces; as the incidence of fraud continues, we must all be diligent to uncover cases of identity theft.

If you are interested in Operation Ore and the fallout, visit Operation Ore Exposed

Tags: operation ore, identity theft, fraud, credit card fraud, due diligence