"Crupt Practice" Member Takes the Rap for Fraud

(Crupt Practice from MySpace)

Melvin Slaughter of the Seattle Rap Group "Crupt Practice" will probably be "rappin" from the big house soon.

The Seattle PI is reporting:

A Secret Service agent arrested a local rap performer Friday on charges that he conned or bribed people to give up ATM cards, flooded the victims' accounts with counterfeit check deposits, then withdrew cash.

Seattle PI story, here.

It appears that Mr. Slaughter used social methods (conning people) to take over their accounts.

Taking over credit card accounts, or opening accounts with other people's information (identity theft) - then inflating their "open to buy" has been around for awhile. Most institutions don't allow payments for more than the "balance owed" for this very reason.

Debit cards are a different story since they are tied to a bank account, or are prepaid - and inflating their balances with bogus payments might be a future fraud trend.

It's hard to limit how much is deposited into an account, or loaded on a card.

This activity seems to be growing - eBay, PayPal, debit, credit and online brokerage accounts have been targeted in recent history. Account takeovers will probably continue to be a problem - and there are indications that keyloggers and crimeware (used to steal online information) are making the problem worse.

Of course, more social methods continued to be used, also.

If you would like to learn about other "crupt practices" involving counterfeit checks, here is a post I did on all the counterfeit cashier's checks that circulate via the electronic world:

Counterfeit Cashier's Checks Fuel Internet Crime

Crupt Practice has a MySpace page, here.

Since there are a lot of "rap" versions of classic rock, perhaps the fellas might consider doing an updated version of "Jailhouse Rock."

Mr. Slaughter should have plenty of "time" to work out the details.