The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [133]
Next, I was shown the computer forensics lab. Here Brent Pack, a burly, bearded man who is Target’s senior computer investigator, analyzes digital storage devices seized from suspected retail-crime gangs—BlackBerrys, photo memory cards, cell phones, business servers, and desktop computers. Pack joined Target three years ago, after a stint in the United States Army, where, as part of the Computer Crime Investigative Unit, he analyzed the photographs taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. (“I had to extract the metadata from inside the pictures and create the time line, because there were multiple cameras taking different photographs and each of them was set to different times,” Pack said. “Took about two months to complete and another month to finalize. Then I had to go to court for two years to testify about it.”) At the moment, Pack was analyzing a hard drive seized by the police in a phony-check-writing operation that had victimized Target stores. “I’m going through here and looking for any evidence of check-writing software on any of their hard drives,” he said, pointing to his computer screen, which showed a JPEG of a bank check. “Drives are so big now—some are five hundred gigabytes—you can’t just randomly search,” he said. “You’ve got to be tactical.”
Brekke launched Target’s crime laboratories, five years ago, with the intention of fighting the “brick and mortar” storefront fences and warehouse repackaging operations that King Rogers had helped to uncover. But since then, Brekke says, the labs have increasingly been used to fight “e-fencing,” the resale of stolen goods online through eBay, Craigslist, and other e-commerce sites, where thieves can operate with virtual anonymity. (Sellers on eBay and other sites are not required to post any personal information; eBay says that “such requirements do nothing to effectively prevent the sale of stolen goods and would expose honest online sellers to significant risk for identity theft.”)
“Those sites have, overnight, become the world’s largest pawnshops,” Nate Garvis, Target’s vice-president of government affairs, says. “It used to be that you’d rip off a stereo, you’d go to a bad part of town and sell it for ten cents on the dollar, and Mrs. Smith, who’d never be caught dead in that part of town, would never find that product. Now you rip it off in bulk, you put it online, you get sixty to seventy to ninety cents on the dollar—because you’ve cut out the middleman—and Mrs. Smith is shopping in her slippers at her dining-room table.”
Brekke says that the explosion of online selling to well-heeled buyers has changed what boosters steal from stores. Instead of baby formula, razors, and over-the-counter medicines, thieves now go after small electronic items and household appliances. According to Paul Ostenson, a senior investigator for Target, and a specialist in the investigation of e-fencing, Dyson vacuum cleaners, which retail for between three hundred and five hundred dollars, have become one of the hottest theft items for sale on auction sites. Thieves often steal the bulky vacuum cleaners through a tactic called “ticket switching”: buying a cheap vacuum cleaner for thirty-nine dollars, then removing the U.P.C. bar code and affixing it to a Dyson that costs ten times as much. Some thieves buy their own U.P.C.-bar-code-making machines—available legally on the Internet—and print their own price stickers.
Last fall, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on organized retail crime, Brekke told lawmakers that Internet auction sites need to make “modest changes” to remove the incentives for criminals to sell stolen goods online. He recommended that people who sell up to a hundred thousand dollars a month of merchandise online be required to identify themselves by name on the sites. Arresting