Title: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

This document presents the results of a WP5/WP8 workshop on ID theft and ID fraud held on 18 May 2005 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. For this workshop three papers were written from different perspectives on ID theft and ID fraud: socio-economic, legal, and technical. The present document provides an integration and consolidation of these three papers. The workshop and this document show that our understanding of ID theft and ID fraud in the ‘online world’ is still limited. For instance, while common parlance denotes the topic of this work to be ID theft, this term is imprecise from a legal perspective as the ID is not stolen – like one can steal a car – but copied. The original identity bearer does not lose her identity by the act of ‘ID theft’. This suggests that we need to refine our concepts and define a proper ontology of the relevant phenomena. This document is more limited in scope, though. It aims to offer a first analysis of the components, from a legal, social and technical perspective, that together comprise ‘ID-related crimes’ as we will denote the range of misuses of ID numbers and other data. The next chapters will provide classifications of phenomena and methods based on applying the different perspectives.

The authors are aware that further development and integration should take place in order to advance our understanding of this relatively new, and rapidly growing, set of phenomena associated with the rise of the information society. 

The present chapter provides a first sketch of ID-related crimes and provides some examples of ID crimes and the legal responses to these crimes. It also discusses the two common forms of these crimes from a more technical point of view: phishing and sniffing.