Like any other criminals, identity thieves can be anywhere and are everywhere.  From the small time shoulder surfer watching you punch in your pin number at the drug store to the high tech savvy criminal who is sending you spyware and malware in the forms of pictures on your social networking site, there is no limit to how far criminals will go to get their hands on private and personal information.  This, after all, is the Information Age and simple ones and zeroes are worth millions and where there is a dollar to be made (or stolen as the case may be) there is a criminal waiting to make it (steal it.)  For example, in the Miami-Dade area, the potential identity thief might be waiting in the hospital to steal your records and sell them to ambulance chasing attorneys.  In what seems like a “torn from the headlines” kind of storyline on Law and Order, a husband and wife team partnered with a hospital employee and stole hundreds of patients’ files with information such has their names, address, phone numbers, and nature of their injuries.  The husband then turned around and sold those lists to attorneys in exchange for monetary kickbacks once the personal injury cases the attorneys filed and won came through.  The husband and wife team paid their hospital crony a thousand dollars a month to ensure that these names and information kept flowing.  Over the course of two years, the woman netted $27,000 in payments.  The husband and wife team who sold that information received over $85,000 from one attorney alone.  The judge in the case was so disgusted by the crimes that she refused to consider their plea bargains, stating that the punishments available to the pleas were nowhere near severe enough to fit the crime.

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