Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Lawyer on hunt for thief who stole his identity
Website bears name, Florida Bar number of George Ackerman
George Ackerman found himself arguing for his very existence when he phoned a website masquerading as his law practice.
The first time Ackerman called the phone number on the website, which bears his name and Florida Bar number, he was told the lawyer was unavailable because he was in court.
How odd. “I haven’t been in court for many, many years,” said Ackerman, a 40-year-old adjunct criminal justice professor at Palm Beach State College and who lives in an unincorporated part of south Palm Beach County.
Another time he called, the person on the other end said Ackerman couldn’t talk on the phone because he was ill with throat cancer.
“It was like being in the Twilight Zone,” he recalls.
Ackerman appears to be the victim of a crime that technically has been a criminal offense for only the past three years.
Before 2015, corporate or business identity theft was a civil issue. His case illustrates the extremes to which thieves go to set up fake businesses — in this case, a law firm — to defraud unwitting consumers, experts say.
For at least one Florida legislator, the ease in which it can be done makes the state’s openness with information an issue that needs to be re-examined in this new digital age.
Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, wants to see information such as birth dates, business tax identity numbers and Florida Bar numbers available online to only certain users.
She already has led a successful charge to make sure businesses are informed when a change to their information with the Florida Department of State is filed.
That prevents people from claiming to be board members of companies and taking out loans or credit cards without the real business owners’ knowledge for a whole year, as they had been. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, Passidomo said.
“One of the biggest problems is that Florida, if you want to do identity theft, is one of the best places to do business,” Passidomo said.
Attorneys have always had to put their bar number on any documents they handle to ensure accountability. Shanell Schuyler, director of the Florida Bar’s Attorney Consumer Assistance Program, said her organization’s mission is written into Florida law.
“We have to have some means of identifying who an attorney is and if they have a license in the state of Florida,” she said. “Since the institution of the Florida Bar as a governing agency, there have been bar numbers issued and they have been public information.”
But Ackerman has his reasons for wishing these Florida Bar numbers were more than a few keystrokes away from the wrong hands.
“They could be doing this to any attorney on the list,” he said. “And they wouldn’t know it.”
Schuyler said Ackerman’s case is among a few others. She’s tracking 10 other impersonation cases this year among the bar’s 106,000 members.
“Usually, it’s just mentioning names,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m an attorney.’”
Ackerman, who has a doctorate in criminal justice, discovered someone was impersonating him in a Ponzi scheme when he received an email that looked like spam from a man in Illinois.
All it said was, “Is this you?” And there was a link for him to click with his initials and last name. Against his better judgment, given all the warnings about clicking on emailed links from unknown senders, he clicked and was stunned at what he saw.
Well-dressed “lawyers” sat at a conference table in front of huge windows. The address was to one of Orlando’s iconic buildings, among the tallest in the city, included in a shot of the city skyline on another page.
“I wish I had an office like that,” Ackerman joked, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I’ve never been to Orlando except to visit Mickey Mouse at Disney World with my family.”
Since then, Ackerman has documented 150 steps he’s taken to stop what he says is a fraudulent timeshare buying and selling operation, for vacation rentals in Mexico using his name.
From contact with victims he’s been able to find, or who found him, he estimates the ID thief or thieves have gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from their scam, he said.
Ackerman, who began his career as a police officer in Palm Beach County and now serves as a reserve officer, has contacted various law enforcement agencies, from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office to Interpol.
He said he got three different website hosting companies to take down the website three times. But beyond an open case with the Orlando police, he’s no closer to knowing who is using his name and Florida Bar number, if they are still doing it or whether they are going to be held accountable.
Orlando Police Detective Michael Stevens said his city has been a magnet for these time-share fraudsters since the bottom fell out of the real estate market in 2008. The cratering of a once-thriving industry in Florida’s vacation destination left scores of legitimate workers in the industry without jobs and timeshare owners desperate to unload their devalued properties, he said. Some of the laid-off workers set up boiler rooms working on finding those desperate times-share owners, he said.
The scheme has taken on various forms, as police bust in on the latest version of the scam, Stevens said.
Ackerman’s case presents a new wrinkle, Stevens said. And because there’s no victim in Orlando, it’s not really his jurisdiction, either. But he’s taking it on.
“If we don’t get involved, no one will,” he said.
He’s still trying to figure out why Ackerman was picked and how a Mexican bank account figures in. Stevens’ five-person team doesn’t have the authority to subpeona those records, so he’s working it up so U.S. Secret Service can take over. He has some words of warning for people, though.
“These fraudsters can work up some of the snazziest websites you’ve ever seen,” he said.
Ackerman has a Google alert out on his name to see if something else pops up. He lives in fear that there’s one Google hasn’t found, though.
“It’s like playing whacka-mole,” he said. “They could be doing it right now and I would have no idea.”
Carrie Kerskie, director of the Identity Theft Institute of Hodges University in Naples, said real estate agents, doctors and certified public accountants have encountered the same phenomena.
It can damage reputations, she said.
“It’s the responsibility of any professional to see what is out there about them on the internet,” she said.
Ackerman’s entry on the Florida Bar website is now missing the middle name once listed. The Florida Supreme Court allowed him to drop it once the fraudulent website came to light. And there’s also a note about how he’s been the victim of identity theft.
For Ackerman, his case underscores a crucial message for the public.
“People need to have a face-to-face meeting with an attorney before they do business with that attorney,” he said.
Kerskie, at the Identity Theft Institute, says Ackerman took the right steps to minimize the damage to himself by reporting it to as many agencies as he can think of. He’s got a stack of certified mail receipts to prove it.
But he’s afraid undoing the damage will be like putting toothpaste back in the tube.
“I’m afraid that in 10 to 15 years, I’ll be known as the head of some giant scam,” he said, recalling the Leonardo DiCaprio film “Catch Me If You Can,” based on the real-life case of a deception master. “As a police officer, I knew about identity theft, I’ve taught about it in class. But I don’t know how to be a victim of it.”
The last phone number he has from the fake site is not working — for now.