by Keith Lubsen

The 15th Annual Economic Crime Conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah was a combination of knowledgeable speakers and interesting topics.

The conference was organized by the Utah Attorney Generals Office.

Linda Criddle (www.Look-Both-Ways.com) began the conference by discussing online safety. Linda’s background includes being Microsoft’s child safety expert and her knowledge about online safety quickly became apparent.

Linda’s specialty is knowledge about how criminals profile their victims. She demonstrated how quickly and easily a criminal can build a profile on a victim. Using social networking sites, public records and other profiling techniques Linda quickly amassed enough data about a female teenage example to send a chill down the spine of audience members. The moral of this part of the presentation is that individuals need to be responsible about what sort of information they post about themselves online (particularly at social networking sites).

Linda also touched on criminal email spam networks. She told how less than reputable psychologists, sociologists, and other human behavior experts are being hired by spammers to craft more effective messages for spam campaigns.

Linda also put forth the fact that criminals are now developing digital dossiers on individuals. Over time criminal’s warehouse pieces of information about individuals until the crooks have enough data about a person to defraud the victim.

Thank you to the Utah AG’s office: Mark Shurtleff, Scott Morrill, Rich Hamp, John Kimball and everyone else at the Utah Office of The Attorney General for their tireless and outstanding work in the fight against identity theft.