Woman with 15 IDs gets 7 years for multiple VAT fraud A Bristol woman has been jailed for using a complex web of 15 different identities and companies to defraud the Revenue out of £118,000. 48-year-old Alison Reynolds was jailed for seven years yesterday for VAT fraud and police offences. Reynolds was found guilty of four charges of cheating the Public Revenue, one charge of …
Bar-Cap and Barclays was one of the few banks that was not bailed out or handed huge wads of cash.
Hence Bob Diamonds stance that he and his bank had done nothing wrong, however the other industry chairmen were all cowering under the table, and will not be seen on TV for a while.
that Barclays benefitted indirectly from the environment that the subsidies to the other banks delivered, and so are just as liable.
Investors expect to try and exploit situations, so Barclays can't be held liable for something that wasn't their problem. They went to the Middle East for their £6.5bn, not the UK, although they may find it hard to repay Gaddafi however much he lent them...
I think we are going to need multiple identities or at least ways to isolate various groups of relations from each other (say, the office doesn't need to know what kinky clubs you like, where the wife works, or what school the children attend, and vv) and since we increasingly must use our legal identities to identify ourselves everywhere that might very well mean multiple identities of sorts.
But cases like this show (and most of us already know--cpt obvious) that it already is possible and doable to defraud and play havoc with others' identities. And I think the system needs to be made more resilient against that.
Not by taking heavy machinery and using that to tie you ever more tighter to the one official identity you have, but by allowing for multiple identities but somehow making fakery harder and more unpalatable to perpetrate and easier to recover from. Make the device as hard to forge as you wish but do note that this means biometrics are out--you can't recover from successful forgery of fingerprints and dna and the like. And they /can/ be forged.
This also means coming up with new concepts and new ways to use them. In this context, moving from identification disguised as authentication to authorization already counts as new. The current system is that crufty, yes. And therefore easily abusable by the enterprising identity abuser. Such as this enterprising woman. Well, I assume she's a she and hasn't faked that too.
In the case of the USA, If for a moment we can separate education/public benefits and State espionage/surveillance, and revamp the IRS to account for commercial and criminal elements, the IRS desperately needs to come up with some sort of 2-part identification and some new laws to impose severe sanctions upon those who defy the changes.
I would propose that since the existing SSN (Social Security Number) scheme as an identification system for its purposes has been compromised by schools, lenders, employers, and others, that it be treated as compromised completely.
There should be a assigned a biometrically-generated ID that is disclosed ONLY to the individual. The individual's existing and newly-assigned numbers might by necessity be kept combined in certain situations such as military, incerceration, and where armed/sworn civilians are charged with public safety.
Consider this: In South Korea, by law, no one can have cellular or internet access without having a national ID number. I am not sure of the exact format, but if it is as I've seen in a film, it is a series of 6 digits hyphenated by 7 digits. From what I've read online, males' digits end odd, and females' even.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Resident_registration_number
For more countries, see:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/National_identification_number
In SK, in anything that requires an individual to supply the NID, males will also have a military service ID number, or an exemption to explain the lack of one. But, imagine if in the UK or USA or other places one could not surf or make mobile calls from one's own phone without supplying an NID.
Some if not all one-time-use "credit" cards -- if you read the VERY VERY fine print -- require the purchaser's SSN. I am not sure if they would use as a substitute the user's or activating individual's SSN or accept some bogus entry.
But, the new scheme of SSN-suffix needs to be something that isolates all known ID of a person and acts only as the individual's known-name and State benefits and insurer health benefits number to prevent con artists from depriving a person of his or her retirement or health benefits. Other things such as loans, employment, and so on should be left on the old number and ONLY in special cases associated with the new, very-private number.
Feel free to expand on it for me!
7 years for £118,000 ? Rediculous. That's a month in prison for every £1400 pounds stolen. Kill a stranger in the street and you might get 4 years. Kill someone in your car and you will get community service. But steal from the crown now, don't you dare.
Unless there was more to this story, it should have been 12 months max.
yes... stealing from the crown is something VERY different and they NEVER EVER give up. Okay their records are utterly shocking and it would normally take about 5 years being on child benefit before thay noticed... but...
Once a person has bypassed a perceived payment to the crown, that payment remains outstanding against that individual until paid, prisoned or post mortem'd.
Fancy a stiff one?
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