Piling up evidence

Methamphetamine users are stealing people's identities; need for drug leads to thefts, law enforcement officials say.

By Adam Foxman, afoxman@VenturaCountyStar.com
March 25, 2007

It's crystal, it's ice, it's powder, it's paste.

Officials say the drug has become the No. 1 illegal substance abused in Ventura County in the past five years, and its users show a predilection for fraud in the hours they spend high and wide awake.

It's methamphetamine.

Stolen goods confiscated from one meth addict convicted of forging hundreds of checks and driver's licenses are stacked inside a shoebox-sized plastic container in the Ventura police station. The box is filled with stolen credit cards, Social Security numbers and checks.

It was part of the evidence the Ventura County District Attorney's Office used to help convict Ventura resident John Cundiff of making fake documents, which he and a ring of meth addicts used to steal about 50 people's identities, said Cpl. Terry Medina, a member of the Ventura Police Department's Street Crimes unit.

The box of evidence is now a visual aid Medina uses to teach other Ventura police officers about the connection between meth and ID theft. His informal course is part of the growing consciousness that methamphetamine abuse and identity theft are often related.

"It seems almost everyone we arrest in ID (theft) cases is a meth user" or dealer, said Sgt. Glen Utter, who heads the Ventura Police Department's Street Crimes unit.

Law enforcement officers see meth so often it "almost seems that besides marijuana, it's the only thing out there," said Capt. Ross Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department.

Meth isn't the only drug abused in Ventura County, but it has the highest profile.

n Six years ago, the majority of people admitted into drug rehabilitation in Ventura County said they used primarily heroin. By 2005, meth had replaced heroin as the most abused drug among people entering rehab in the county.

n In Ventura County, meth abusers make up 60 percent of the people referred to California's Proposition 36 drug diversion program for nonviolent offenders, according to the county Behavioral Health Department. Statewide, meth abusers account for 50 percent of those referred to the five-year-old program.

Hard statistics on identity theft are more difficult to pin down. States began to recognize the crime officially in the late 1990s. Law enforcement departments place the crime in overlapping categories, including identity theft and various types of fraud.

Nationwide, from 8 million to 15 million Americans were victims of identity theft last year, according to studies by the Gartner and Javelin research companies.

Connection is easy to see

The Ventura County District Attorney's Office reported 819 cases of fraud in 2006. Identity theft figures into each of seven categories of crimes, including using someone else's personal information to commit a crime and using a fraudulent access card.

The District Attorney's Office does not break out complete numbers of identity theft cases, however.

Because the data on identity thefts are imprecise, it is nearly impossible to know how many of the crimes are connected to methamphetamine users, said Howard Wise, a deputy district attorney who prosecutes major fraud and computer crimes cases in Ventura County. But the connection is easy to see in the criminal justice system, he said.

"The vast majority of the defendants in the serious and complex identity theft cases claim to be users of methamphetamine," he explained.

Wise prosecuted Cundiff's case, and he has handled similar cases in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard, he said.

Medina first saw a correlation between meth use and identity theft in 2002, when he moved from the narcotics division to property crimes.

"Some of the people I saw in narcotics, their names were coming up in check forgery cases or in theft cases," he said.

This year, Medina began volunteering to teach his course on methamphetamine and identity theft for the California Narcotics Officers Association. The organization has two similar courses scheduled this year, one in Stockton and another in Hayward.

Conducive to criminal behavior

The connection between identity theft and methamphetamine users has been recognized nationwide.

In a 2005 survey by the National Association of Counties, 27 percent of respondents reported increases in identity theft due to meth use. The county officials responding also linked meth to increases in burglaries, robberies, domestic violence and jail populations.

Addictions of all kinds have long been linked to theft, but methamphetamine is particularly conducive to criminal behavior, said Igor Koutsenok, director of the Center for Criminality and Addiction Research, Training and Application at UC San Diego.

The drug boosts dopamine, a brain chemical that regulates emotion and pleasure, along with serotonin. Binge users can become paranoid as they stay hyped up for long periods of time, sometimes without sleep or food, he said.

To understand why methamphetamine can lead to criminality, start by imagining a car, said Koutsenok, who is also a psychiatrist.

"Dopamine is gas, serotonin is a brake fluid. Imagine a car full of gas with no brake fluid driven by a paranoid driver." That's what a meth user is like while on the drug, he said.

Other stimulants — including cocaine --— have similar effects as methamphetamine, but meth is cheaper and more easily available, Koutsenok said. The effects of using meth also last much longer than cocaine: from 10 to 12 hours, compared to 45 minutes for the coca-based stimulant, according to state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

Unlike users of depressants such as heroin, who tend to enjoy their lethargic highs in solitude, revved up and paranoid meth users tend to band together, officials said.

"What we see is that a small group of four to five people can become a mini crime wave," said Port Hueneme Police Detective Robert Albertson.

Cycle would start again

That's what police say happened in Cundiff's case. A low-level methamphetamine dealer, Cundiff would give the drug to a small group of addicts who brought him stolen mail and other personal information, Medina said. Cundiff would manufacture fake documents with the information, and other addicts would use those documents to cash fake checks or buy goods they could sell. The money would come back to Cundiff for meth, and the cycle would start all over again, Medina said.

Meth also lends itself to identity theft, because users are able to stay up all night and focus on tasks such as working on computers, Wise said.

"It's almost the type of crime you'd expect to see from someone doing a drug like that."

The link between meth abusers and property crime drove the Ventura Police Department to create its Street Crimes unit two years ago, said Utter. The unit combines narcotics and property crime investigators.

Harsher sentencing begins

Other local law enforcement agencies address identity theft and meth abuse, but rarely the specific connection.

As part of the Port Hueneme Special Problems unit, Albertson deals with identity theft and narcotics among a slew of other crimes.

The danger meth-addicted parents pose to children drove a number of county agencies to form a cooperative Drug-Endangered Child Program. A formal announcement about the new program will come Friday in a news conference.

As identity theft becomes more common, Ventura County courts have started handing out harsher sentences to people convicted of the crime, Wise said.

In a July 2005 case, Oxnard resident Richard Frenes was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in a series of identity thefts. Frenes was convicted of nine felonies, including four counts of identity theft, after police found him in a motel room with thousands of pieces of mail, a computer and other tools common in identity theft operations, according to the District Attorney's Office. Frenes was on probation for a narcotics violation when he was arrested.

Cundiff's 2006 sentence of five years and four months in prison was another example of increasingly severe sentencing, said the deputy district attorney.

Because identity theft is widespread and deeply intertwined with other illegal activities such as methamphetamine abuse, prosecution is not enough to combat it, said Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego.

He said increasing sentences for identity thieves might deter some low-level criminals, but to really reduce identity theft, businesses, consumers and the government need to make personal information harder to steal.

Right now, he said, identity theft "is an incredibly easy crime to commit."

— Star staff writer Tamara Koehler contributed to this report.