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Tampa Bay is among leaders for fraud

The Tampa Bay area has a disproportionate number of financial crimes, and local authorities are left to shoulder the burden while the feds' attention is elsewhere.

By SHANNONCOLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published October 2, 2005

	The Tampa Police Department economic crimes unit investigated 770 cases from January through August. Here's how they broke down: Check related: 186 Forgery: 169 Identity theft: 197 Credit card: 78 Other: 140 The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office economic crimes unit has investigated 1,816 cases since January. Here's how they broke down. Identity theft: 338 Forgery: 584 Counterfeiting: 120 Embezzlement: 20 Financial exploitation of elderly: 10 Fraud: 744.

TAMPA - Detective Kimberly Pluorde-Torres' crime scenes aren't crash sites with mangled cars and motorists. In many cases, the Tampa police detective never meets victims face to face.

Her evidence is a lengthy, complicated paper trail of e-mails, banking statements, Internet auction receipts and U.S. Postal Service records. Rather than collect guns and fingerprints, she tracks down Internet providers and bank transactions.

So goes life in the economic crimes unit, a newly created - and increasingly busy - division of the Tampa Police Department.

"We're not a high-profile unit," said Pluorde-Torres, who joined the squad more than a year ago. "But our suspects can take hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they don't have to lay a finger on anyone."

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area ranks eighth in the nation for fraud cases, though it ranks 20th in population, federal agencies report.

Law enforcement officials say the Internet and emerging technologies make it easier for people to commit such crimes, and the FBI, focused in recent years on terrorism, does not devote as many resources as in the past to investigating them.

The result is a growing case load for local detectives - many of whom never thought they would become so well versed in banking laws and IP addresses.

Sheriff's offices in Hillsborough and Pinellas have responded with similar units. The St. Petersburg Police Department and Pasco County Sheriff's Office investigate economic crimes as part of broader property crimes units.

"This type of investigation is specialized," said Hillsborough sheriff's Sgt. John Campo, who leads that agency's economic crimes unit, which was reorganized earlier this year by Sheriff David Gee. "There's a lot of detail, and you have to be very methodical. The paper trail can be very, very long in these things."

At the start of the year in Hillsborough, Gee moved eight detectives, previously spread across four districts, into one unit so they could better coordinate their work.

To date, the detectives have investigated 1,816 economic crimes, including 338 identity theft cases and 744 fraud cases.

Tampa's unit investigated 770 cases through the end of August, including 197 identity thefts and 78 cases involving credit card fraud.

Pinellas County's 14-detective unit handles about 2,000 cases a year, and unit leader Sgt. Robert Hart anticipates the case load will continue to grow.

"Technology's getting better, they're getting smarter, it's getting easier to do," Hart said. "It's easier to steal while sitting in your living room than getting in your car to go steal. And they're figuring that out."

One local FBI special agent calls identity theft "an epidemic" that is growing faster than law enforcement can keep up with it.

The numbers suggest he is not exaggerating.

The Federal Trade Commission received more than 635,000 consumer fraud and identity theft complaints last year, 17 percent more than in 2003. The complaints represented nearly $550-million in losses.

Credit card fraud was the most commonly reported identity theft, and Internet auctions were the leading source of fraud complaints.

Tampa Police Chief Steve Hogue said his detectives are "just starting to come to grips with it now."

"It's a little different from traditional police work because it takes a whole new skill set," said Hogue, who created the economic crimes unit last year.

Sgt. Hart of the Pinellas Sheriff's Office started to see the climb in economic crimes more than a decade ago.

His unit, established in 1990, had started off focusing on organized crime.

"But the trend was, people were starting to get better printers, better computers, more technology," he said. "They were starting to copy counterfeit money, checks. There was this explosion of high-tech white-collar crime."

Today Hart's detectives also investigate environmental crimes and trademark violations, but he said much of their time is spent investigating counterfeit check schemes, fake money orders and financial exploitation of the elderly.

"When we started in 1990, nobody here even really had a clue what we were getting into."

Pluorde-Torres has been investigating 24-year-old Jon Burke for a year, and last week, she found someone she believes to be his 12th victim.

The Tampa Police detective already knows of 11 EBay customers, all of them living out of state, who allegedly got swindled by the Tampa man, starting in October 2004.

Now, here was another name to add to the case, which Pluorde-Torres calls her "indoctrination" into economic crime investigations.

The case against Burke, wanted since July on one count of organized fraud and six counts of grand theft, taught the detective how to chase down IP addresses, Internet auctions and banking records.

Today the case file is about 3 inches thick, filled with copies of check deposit slips, subpoenaed bank records, EBay auction records, e-mails and U.S. Postal Service receipts showing the victims sent checks for the items.

Burke is accused of posting items for sale on EBay, then never sending them to buyers who sent money to his parents' address and to a post office box.

In all, the 12 victims lost more than $10,000, Pluorde-Torres says.

Cases handled by Pluorde-Torres and the other economic crimes detectives range from $25 counterfeit checks to embezzlement schemes involving tens of thousands in stolen funds. Some cases have a local suspect whose victims are scattered across the state or the country.

While some cases can be wrapped up in a week or two, others take months.

"By nature, most of these cases take longer because of the paper trail," said Hart, of the Pinellas Sheriff's Office unit. "When we get into a major case, doing the audits and going through the bank records, it can take months and even longer. We have some that have taken more than a year."

Pluorde-Torres doesn't know when she'll be able to close out the EBay case. But she'll juggle it with the four dozen or so other cases she's working on.

She and her fellow economic crimes detectives each get one or two new cases a day, she said.

She recently went to a meeting with local representatives from banks and the U.S. Postal Service, agencies that communicate regularly with law enforcement because they are often the victims of economic crimes.

"I left there with three new cases," she said.

Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 813 226-3373 or svansickler@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 2, 2005, 16:36:13]