A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 401

Address munging, or changing the format of email addresses when they are
displayed, is one measure. Thus, instead of [e-mail] the address
would be “Capers at privatemail dot com.” This can be overcome but adds costs
to email harvesting.
CAPTCHA is a method that displays numbers or letters in a little box, often in
graphic form. In order to complete a transaction, the user must key in the charac-
ters that are displayed. Harvesting bots are not able to translate this text or enter
the keys. Thus, the CAPTCHA method minimizes the risk of email harvesting.
Spider traps are part of a website designed to attract email harvesters or spiders.
The website includes a “honeypot” that is assumed by the spider to contain useful
emails but in reality is a trap that blocks access.
There are other methods for harvesting emails, and this is a continuing problem
for the modern world.
Identity Thefts
The crime of identity theft has become one of the most common crimes in the
modern world. Data from the web indicate that about 4.8% of U.S. households will
experience an identity theft. The absolute numbers are in the range of perhaps 15
million people per year in the United States alone. Surprisingly, identify theft also
includes about three million dead people. Many identity theft victims are children.
A disturbing fact about identity theft is that it often involves relatives or “friends”
of the victims.
Identity theft is not a victimless crime because the stolen identities are often
used to steal money from banks, make unauthorized use of credit cards, create
phony credit cards, rent automobiles, travel by air, and do other kinds of serious
harm to the victims. In a few cases, houses have been fraudulently sold by people
who were not the true owners!
Worse, the credit ratings and sometimes the reputations of the victims are dam-
aged by identity thieves, and recovery is not easy to achieve. Innocent people have
even been arrested when an identity thief performs a crime such as armed robbery
and the identity theft victim is wrongly blamed.
There are numerous ways of stealing identities. Some of these are listed below:
• Stealing mail such as bills from mailboxes
• Rummaging through dumpsters outside of office buildings
• Stealing wallets and purses