When I first moved here and took over the court beat from my former colleague Megan Pecjak, I was introduced to a couple of unsavory individuals who had a penchant for stealing mail.
After learning one of them had actually kept a diary of their illegal activities with stolen credit cards, I gave them a nickname and thought they would have been perfect contestants for a Canadian version of the television show ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’.
After a year and a half of living in town however, I decided to put down some roots and moved to an acreage in the county.
In February, I learned my own mailbox had been broken into. While I check my box on a daily basis, I haven’t lost a lot of sleep over what the crooks may have gotten.
I changed my licence before I moved, my bills are all paperless and if, by some chance, they managed to get my credit card information, well, the joke’s on them because it’s in the red.
About all they could have stolen are some flyers and since I shop elsewhere, it doesn’t really matter.
Or so I thought.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Barrhead and District Rural Crime Watch Association’s annual general meeting and learned that identity theft is a lot more than just stolen credit cards.
As you will read in the story on Page 10A, it isn’t just seniors who are targeted either. In this day and age, social media platforms might be floundering but as Lloyd Kenney says, on any given day there are more than 60,000 criminals buying and selling our private information on Internet chatrooms.
The idea that our society hammers pot smokers with hefty fines and slaps identity thieves on the wrist with conditional sentences is laughable.
Destroying someone’s life to mask your own criminality, or violating someone’s sense of security for the sake of a concert ticket you’re inevitably going to scalp, well, that just makes my skin crawl.
I think it’s high time the justice system takes a firmer stance and if there isn’t legislation to support it, I believe the lawmakers of this country should do something about it.
I wonder how the criminals would feel if the tables were turned and they were the victims.
Maybe we should institute an identity thief database and force people convicted of these crimes to put signs outside their homes.
But that’s just my opinion.