JACQUELYN PABON I STAFF
Student Jasmine Jackson was arrested on charges of fraud and identity theft after stealing and making hundreds of dollars in purchases with a friend’ s debit card information.
By Ron Hickerson, Chief Reporter
After making a couple hundred dollars in purchases on a friend’s debit card without permission, a Georgia Regents University student was arrested on charges of fraud.
According to a police report from Georgia Regents Department of Public Safety, Jasmine Jackson, 20, was charged earlier this month with stealing a friend’s debit card information in late January and using that information to make several purchases. The victim of the fraud became aware of the theft once she began receiving calls from her bank informing her of some recent charges.
“(Jackson) made several charges using the (debit) card number by ordering on the phone and using Amazon,” Capt. Ted McNeal said. “We found out that the phone that was used to make the transaction came back to that same person and we went from there.”
Public Safety officers were able to trace the purchases to Jackson once the victim began contesting a $30 charge to T-Mobile, where she was given Jackson’s first name and the last four digits of her phone number, according to the police report. This discovery led the victim to suspect Jackson, which gave Public Safety officers the opportunity to question Jackson about the incident where she confessed to making the charges.
In addition to paying for phone services, the police report said Jackson also used the card to order food from a local Chinese food restaurant and several products from Amazon. com. After Public Safety officers were able to trace the purchases back to Jackson, McNeal said she was arrested on felony charges of fraud.
Crimes like this one are becoming more and more common, McNeal said, citing scams that have recently cropped up in students’ e-mail inboxes like an e-mail from the University Health Credit Union. The e-mail told students that their debit cards were malfunctioning and needed to send in their information in order to be sent new cards.
Another scam that showed up in inboxes across campus that students heard about was e-mail messages supposedly sent from friends or family members saying they are stuck in a foreign country due to having their passport, cash and credit cards stolen and need to have money wired to them if they ever hope to get home.
“People are trying to scam everybody,” McNeal said. “The economy’s so bad and everything. They’re just trying to make a quick buck, but it’s against the law.”
These scams are just a reflection of a report made by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that states incidents of identity theft have been rising in recent years.
In its most recent report on identity theft, the BJS reported 8.6 million United States households had at least one person 12 years old or older who was victimized by identity theft in 2010. These thefts resulted in these households as a whole experiencing $13.3 billion in direct financial losses. The number of thefts grew 33 percent from 2005 where 6.4 million households were victimized.
One of the reasons that identity theft may be growing is its overall ease. McBride said identity theft has become easier for potential thieves because people are putting more personal information online than they should.
“Don’t put your information out there,” he said when asked how students can best protect themselves from identity thieves. “I think too much information is on Facebook and (other) websites. It is so easy to get the information off websites. Don’t help them; they already can obtain it. It’s just so easy. The computer age is here now and anybody can almost hack anything.”
He also said students can best protect themselves from identity theft by contacting Public Safety whenever they have any questions about making purchases online or through businesses like Craigslist, saying that most identity thefts students experience can be avoided if they just asked Public Safety officers.