Healthcare? Yes, and the game is an interesting one. People that cannot afford healthcare will steal your identity and use it to get medical care at a hospital. Once the care is given, they disappear and leave you with a hospital calling wanting to know when you will pay. This crime makes sense in today’s environment, not that I am impressed that it is happening. This crime is growing at a rate of 375% year over year, and it is in second place.

The winner at a 500% growth is online account theft. When you think about it, this makes sense because it is so darn easy to just pretend like you are someone else online. It is also not that difficult for bad guys to hijack your actual account evidently because they are getting it done on platforms like Facebook. If Facebook cannot stop people from stealing accounts, then who can! Of course it is not all their fault because people tend to be sloppy with their passwords and indiscrete with clicking on links they should leave alone. The problem with Social Technology and services like Paypal is that in the never-ending quest for ease of use, we also get easy access to someone pretending to be us. While I am sure we will find some clever solution to this in the future, I suspect it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Let’s take a look at some of the things we may start seeing on a regular basis in the future…

In a virtual world, we trust that there is a human being behind an avatar because a name we recognize might be attached to that avatar. Maybe a live person told us the description of their avatar, and from that point on we impute that anytime we see that avatar, it is that person. But what if someone steals that identity? If we were talking about a simple matter of them spending the money that is attached to your avatar, that is one level of theft. Imagine that someone steals your avatar and then attends business meetings on you behalf so they can steal corporate data from a virtual meeting. What if they perpetuate some online crime while wearing your avatar? I can imagine a whole cottage industry growing up around verifying that the right human being is controlling a specific avatar.

What about people stealing online identities in order to do damage to companies online reputations, or to enhance the reputation of a company you do not support. Think about how strange it will be to search on your name and find out that you trashed a company that you really know nothing about. This will happen when the bad guys figure out they might be able to extort money from companies in order to not mount negative online reputation campaigns against them. If you think I am crazy, you might recall that two companies sued Yelp a few weeks ago for extortion for threatening to put negative ratings on their restaurant sites unless they advertised with Yelp.

I have lots of pictures in my head as to where online crime might go, and if I am even half right, we are in for a bumpy road for the next few years…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Welcome to the Dead Pool. I have been trying to sort out my feelings for the fact that CompuUSA is closing its doors. On one hand, I hate to see a computer chain close. On the other, I can understand why. The most interesting point in this failure is not to ask all the reasons why they could not make money, but why Apple is able to succeed with their stores so well. The comparison of these two retail locations points out some interesting trends in consumer movements these days. The Apple Store provides a deep display of all their latest products, and adds nice touches like emailing your receipt to you instead of handing you paper. The “sales” people are more like your friendly tech savvy nephew that just wants to tell you what he knows. They never push themselves on you unless you ask, and when you do solicit their help, they are more than happy to be patient and get you what you need. At the CompUSA stores, you were either accosted by multiple people as you walked the aisles, or could not find anyone that was clued in enough to give a sane answer. The bottom line is, the Apple Stores are cool, CompUSA was not.