Digital identity theft is a criminal phenomenon prodromal to the commission of further offenses, which is divided into several phases, namely:
- obtaining the victim’s personal information;
- interaction with personal information, which consists in the possession and sale of such data;
- the use of personal information unlawfully obtained to commit further crimes, not necessarily against property, but also for example defamation or threats get legal aid toronto.
The protections offered by our legal system in cases of digital identity theft. We assume that identity theft is not only an ethically incorrect practice, but it is a real crime. However, the current Criminal Code does not provide for a specific incriminating rule, it does not dedicate an ad hoc article to it, but it can be derived from various regulatory provisions. The conduct of someone who commits digital (or computer) identity theft, therefore, we can abstractly make it fall into two criminal hypotheses.
To integrate the crime, it is sufficient for the perpetrator of the crime to carry out one of the various behaviors envisaged and there is no concurrence between the various behaviors. The constitutive fact of the crime consists in misleading someone through one of the four conducts indicated strictly by article 494 of the criminal code:
- illegitimate substitution of one’s own person for another person;
- attribution of a false name to oneself or others;
- attribution to oneself or others of a false status, the civil or political position of the subject, citizenship, capacity to act;
- attribution to oneself or others of a quality to which the law attributes legal effects.
Let’s think, for example, of the hacker who, using our e-mail account, asks our contacts to provide him with their personal data. The latter, misled, will communicate their data believing they are in contact with a friend and not with an attacker. Hence, the realization of the unfair profit for the hacker and the others harm both the owner of the e-mail account and his friends.
In any case, computer fraud aggravated by digital identity theft occurs when a person, by altering a computer system in any way, manages to obtain an unfair profit with consequent damage to the victim.
An emblematic case of computer fraud aggravated by digital identity theft is the use of cloned credit cards. In this hypothesis, the hacker manages to illegally penetrate the various banking systems by pretending to be the holders of the cloned cards and thus realizing an unfair profit for himself with damage to others. And it is precisely to avoid certain phenomena from happening that it is good practice (even if not always respected) for retailers to request an identity document, proving that the person holding the credit card is the same as the document shown.