Convicted paedophiles ‘may be ID theft victims’… Are you still not concerned about ID Theft?
According to a Metro report a Court of Appeal challenge arising from Operation Ore (a big police effort to investigate online paedophiles) hundreds of British men dubbed as paedophiles may have actually been victims of identity theft.
The cost of these potentially false allegations is worth bearing in mind before you openly share private data online and has been summed up very well by Solicitor Chris Saltrese who is representing dozens of convicted men including Anthony O’Shea who was jailed for 5 months in 2005 for incitement to distribute indecent images of children.
“I have clients who have lost everything: their jobs, their homes, their marriages, their children and their health… my client admitted accessing adult pornography but would produce evidence that his credit card had been fraudulently used to access a paedophile site within Landslide. Mr O’Shea’s home was raided in 2002 but no images were found… …at the time the card was used my client was at a festival… …the Landslide database was absolutely riddled with fraud… …we are not just talking about isolated incidents here. In some cases clients did make a complaint to their credit card companies that they had been the victims of fraud, in others they didn’t, but that is kind of by the by – even if they hadn’t made a complaint we say the evidence against them is unreliable.”
The Guardian has estimated that 39 of those arrested and prosecuted during Operation Ore have killed themselves.
Operation Ore began in 2001 after US investigators passed on the names of 7,100 Britons registered on Landslide Inc, an online company providing access to adult pornography and child abuse images.
