Beware the Lonely Hearts Club Scam

"What I am finding is these people are in fact retired drug dealers who are sick of getting shot at and arrested," Goldberg said at the summit, which drew thousands of security professionals to Washington for four days.

These days, identity theft is almost as lucrative as drug dealing -- but safer.

A stolen credit card number can sell for $100 to $1,000 on the black market, Goldberg said, depending on whether it includes the expiration date and other security codes, plus background on its owner.

Goldberg didn't hold out much hope of stopping ID theft anytime soon, particularly, he said, because banks and other financial institutions have such strong financial interest in making it easy for people to get credit.

One real-world case he cited involved Harold McCoy, whom he described as a former "stick-up man." McCoy allegedly wooed a female Red Cross employee he met in a bar and persuaded her to give him information on blood donors, which he used to commit ID thefts.

"Harold is doing 10 years now," Goldberg said.

Goldberg described similar cases involving insiders at banks, schools and hotels, including a Philadelphia hotel employee who stole credit card numbers from work and used them to purchase Amtrak tickets. He sold the tickets at a discount to strangers out of his home, which got so much traffic that it looked like a train station.

One less-sophisticated data thief was a truck driver for a shredding firm that companies hired to destroy their financial documents. The driver was on a run one day with a load of boxes holding 100,000 bank-account records, and he impulsively pulled into an alley and hid a few boxes. After a nosy woman watching from her window called authorities, the FBI came and staked out the alley.

"Sure enough, back he came," said Goldberg. "He really had no idea what to do with the data. . . . His plan was to go to the corner bar . . . and find a concierge."

My favorite tale involved the guy who tricked hotel clerks in the Caribbean into faxing him credit card transactions by phoning and telling them that he worked for Visa and their transactions were not coming through. Nine of out ten clerks hung up, but the rest unwittingly faxed their data to a Kinko's near the man's house, thinking it was a Visa office.

And what did the thief do with the credit card numbers?

"He had a shoe addiction," Goldberg said. "He only bought shoes with this stolen information -- hundreds of pairs. We caught him at a UPS center where he was picking up his shoes."

So ladies, be doubly wary of men bearing drinks and wearing expensive shoes. They just may be new-age data thieves trying to recruit new cyber-mules.

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atleslie@lesliewalker.com.