After a string of arrests, the Attorney General’s office has found that the use of fraudulent credit cards and stolen identities is the new frontier for organized crime, said Mass. Attorney General Martha Coakley in a press conference.
Sharon “Aaron” Yousheei was arrested Tuesday night when his flight from Mexico landed in Logan International Airport after allegedly using a fraudulent credit card on more than one occasion.
“In many ways, this case illustrates the new face of crime, one that uses computers as the weapon of choice, one that robs people of their identities and their financial information instead of just their possessions,” Coakley said.
She said this new frontier for organized crime is more difficult to catch because criminals are making themselves more obscure and harder to track.
“With computers and other technology, we’ve realized that criminals can in many ways expand their reach, network and their invisibility beyond conventional criminal enterprises,” Coakley said. “The new technology, of course, is both a target as it is in this instance because it’s very valuable on the open market.”
Coakley said Aaron’s brother, Shahab Yousheei, is the alleged leader of a counterfeit ring.
The Boston Police Department arrested him March 14 and charged him with identity theft, opening false mobile phone accounts, making false credit cards, using them to buy and sell products and purchasing counterfeit money.
“Crimes like this impact not just the people whose identities or credit card numbers were stolen, but obviously the businesses that were robbed of their profits and their merchandise,” Coakley said. “It serves to compromise business and public safety well beyond the immediate impact.”
All of these stolen items were bought and sold at Shahab Yousheei’s kiosk at 449 Washington St. in Downtown Crossing.
Richard Lehr, a journalism professor at Boston University and an expert on Boston’s mob history, said if James “Whitey” Bulger was still involved in the mob, he would have taken an interest in this new form of crime.
“I can see Bulger, if he were still in charge, being intrigued by the profit making potential there,” Lehr said. “He wouldn’t learn it or care, but he would try to find a way to penetrate it by making people pay him if they are going to be engaged in any sort of crime.”
This kind of organized crime is different from what Bulger was allegedly involved with because it involves less of an intimidation factor and more intelligence, Lehr said.
“In the Internet age, computer and identity theft is becoming a rich new profit-making avenue for criminals, “Lehr said. “There have been some amazing cases where some computer types couldn’t resist the temptation and they just start making a ton of money, but they hardly fit the profile of a gangster.”
As to the question of whether or not organized crime can permanently be eliminated, Lehr said he was doubtful.
“The nature of human life is that there will always be organized crime,” Lehr said. “The Bulgers have been blasted, the mafia’s been blasted, so in many ways, they have managed to reduce the impact or power of organized crime … Where there’s money to be made there will always be crime.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
