More than you wanted to know about the ease of identity theft

Dumpster-Diving for Your Identity. There's too much to summarize, but here's a brief snip.

Massey began hanging out with a much younger crowd of meth addicts, called ''tweakers,'' and forging checks to feed his drug use. It was during this time that he began to wonder if he could hijack people's identities for profit. He stumbled onto the answer soon after, when the meth-heads invited him to go ''Dumpster diving'' for junk. Massey and the teenagers piled into his Ford Explorer and drove to the outskirts of Eugene.

''It was the first time I had ever been to the dump,'' Massey recalled, wrinkling his nose. ''I said, 'I'm not going to get dirty,' so I wandered over to a shed where the recycling was stored. I notice there's a big barrel for recycled paper that's full of discarded tax forms from an accounting firm.'' Each form had the person's name, date of birth, Social Security number -- all the information necessary for taking out a line of credit.

''The wheels started turning in my head,'' Massey said, smiling. ''The guys profiled here were pulling in $800,000 a year. So I told the tweakers to get all this stuff in the truck. Now! I said, 'This is worth five million right here.'''
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Some identity thieves do go straight to the Internet, hacking into databases or using ''phisher sites'' -- phony Web pages that mimic real banking and e-commerce sites in order to entice victims to hand over sensitive information. But those cases remain the exception, not the rule. For the most part, obtaining dates of birth and Social Security numbers still begins off line, and often in the trash.

You all be careful out there. And it's nice to know that the two crooks featured in the article got minimal jail time when they were caught.