Digital crime now a rule of thumb
A ‘Back to the Future’-ish era of actual thumb bandits could soon be upon us
A wave of digital financial crimes was traced to a shadowy ring of “thumb bandits” who gained access to corporate and high-end individual bank accounts worldwide, unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars in treasure as well as cyber secrets that could compromise national security, federal authorities said this week.
The ring, believed to operate out of Silicon Valley and which leaves a mysterious thumbs-up icon at the scene of its biggest crimes, uses biometric technology to gain access to well-protected mobile bank accounts, thumb-pad-activated deposit boxes, Bloomberg financial terminals, even the ubiquitous iPhone.
A rash of illegal “thumb mug- gings” is at the heart of the scheme, with hundreds of people reporting being zapped unconscious by their mobile phones while in the hospital, only to wake up with a bloody stump where their right or left thumb used to be.
Sound crazy? It certainly was in the late 1980s, when screenwriter Bob Gale envisioned a futuristic world in 2015 for his Back to the
Future series, inhabited by thumb bandits who committed crimes with stolen thumbs used to operate locks and appliances.
While three decades later most of us still use good old-fashioned keys or key cards to enter our homes and offices, biometric security is quickly becoming the norm as technology develops. And the concept that it could be used to access financial accounts is as simple as activating your Twitter feed.
While thumb amputations still seem a bit, well, Hollywood, the idea of stealing or counterfeiting biometric characteristics is not out of the realm of criminal thought. The BlackBerry revolution of the late 1990s was a giant step in the human evolutionary process, one in which we became capable of using our thumbs to communicate and survive.
Previous thumb use — confined to hitchhiking, green thumbs, thumbs in the eye, Fonzielike thumbs-up mating efforts and Facebook’s ubiquitous “like” button — could take us only so far. Now, great novels can be written with thumbs. Journalists thumb from the front lines. Drones flown by pilot thumbs can bomb terrorists thousands of miles away. Great ships of war can be directed across video-game screens and seas of virtual reality. And, of course, we initiate banking transactions, access airline tickets and summon Uber rides with them.
Thumb prints at your local police station are now used by Little League baseball teams to vet the records of potential coaches for children. The “Global Entry” system for entering the U.S. from outside its borders hinges on finger recognition, though not thumbs. “Fat finger” trades have disrupted stock markets and just this week caused Deutsche Bank to announce it had mistakenly sent $6 billion to a hedge fund client. Indeed, the criminal opportunity for counterfeit, or stolen, thumbs and assorted digits seems bigger every day.
Thumb branding, popular as a way of identifying criminals in 18th-century England, could be revived, perhaps as a fashion fad in today’s tattoo-obsessed culture. Thumb farms could sprout, using DNA technology to grow a sinister army of cyber outlaws, perhaps known as the Rule of Thumb, with the ability to access all but the smallest financial portals. The Rolling Stones song Under My
Thumb could be its anthem. What Gale envisioned, viewed now from the prism of the future, might still seem as crazy now as it did then. But after all we’ve lived through that has come true since the movie series, we’d be silly to, uh, thumb our noses at it.