Americans are being held up in record numbers.  Not in burglaries or robberies, but by using a computer, on the Internet, in an on-line bazaar crawling with thieves. 

“These criminals can make more money in their little feetie pajamas in Lithuania behind a computer than they ever could with a gun in the middle of the night,” said Bill Morrow, President of CSIdentity, an Austin-based monitoring service that can spot thefts and notify clients when their identities are stolen, then help with the clean-up. . 

Criminals are prowling chat rooms, where identities are bought and sold like cheap stocks.  According to Morrow, these computer users can get a “full name, address, city state zip phone number credit card numbers expiration dates and CVN codes.

With that information, criminals can get credit cards, loans, even jobs, under your name – all for a few dollars and an Internet connection.  

The chat rooms are based overseas, out of reach of U.S. law enforcement.  Account numbers sell for a few pennies to a few dollars each.  The crooks don’t trust each other to pay via credit card, perhaps for obvious reason.  They buy and trade in “e-gold”, an electronic currency backed by gold bullion.

“They're in the U.K., Russia, different types of countries that are just hosting the computers that people are chatting on, and everybody is at home, just connected to these rooms chatting with each other,” said Isaac Chapa, Director of Technology for CSIdentity.

Chapa visits the rooms, maneuvering his way through a maze of servers in other countries; not to buy, but to see what is being bought.  

The really frightening part of the chat rooms is that they no longer need actual possession of your credit cards or checks to steal your identity.

“A new wave that we have seen are criminals will get your identity, and they won't waste it on a $50 credit card ...they'll hold that identity until they get caught for a crime,” said Morrow.

According to Morrow, identity thieves are hacking into personnel files, business, computer and even home Internet accounts, looking to steal not money but information.

“All people need are the numbers,” he said.  “They don't need the physical assets. We literally have found over two-and-a-half million credit cards on line to be sold, and not one of those is the physical card.”

Joe Sherfy has been an identity theft victim more than once, even though he’s never lost physical possession of his card.

“After it happens a few times, you just wonder if this is going to keep happening,” he said. 

Someone charged a few hundred dollars, which he didn’t have to pay, but he was still alarmed someone somewhere knew his personal information.

“I've actually thought about on the back of my credit card blacking out the little code and see if that would help,” said Sherfy.  “Then you'd just have to memorize them.”

To keep your ID out of the den of thieves, the Federal Trade Commission recommends:

--Protecting your Social Security number, giving it out only when absolutely necessary.

--Selecting intricate passwords for all Internet accounts, making them more difficult for hackers to decode.

--Protecting both your mail and your trash, to keep private information private.

Back in the chat rooms, Chapa is still showing us the tricks of the illicit trade he monitors, hoping to stop the new breed of online highway robbers.

“They're hiding behind a computer screen,” he said.  “It could be a 15-year-old kid somewhere trying to get into these rooms and selling it, but nobody really knows who that person is.”