Hackers: Stolen accounts mostly worthless

[Coalition]

Source page: +http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7643796/site/newsweek/

Debtor Nation

An angry hacker complains that debt-saddled Americans don’t have identities worth stealing.WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Andy Borowitz

Newsweek

Updated: 3:15 p.m. ET April 26, 2005

April 26 - An identity thief who has stolen over half a million identities over the past two years returned all but four of them today, declaring the identities "totally worthless" and "an enormous waste of my time and hard work."

The computer hacker, who spoke to reporters via conference call today, said that "in all my years of stealing identities, I have never come across a bigger collection of losers."

He said that he had spent months hacking through the security firewall of one of the nation's largest financial institutions, hoping to reap billions of dollars for his efforts, but after sifting through the stolen identities he found that they were "little more than a garbage dump of unpaid college loans and overdue Blockbuster bills."

"Everybody's running around worried about identity theft these days," he added. "All I can say is, ‘Don't flatter yourself by thinking you have an identity that's worth my time.’"

In San Diego, at the annual convention of the National Association of Hackers and Identity Thieves, some of the nation's most prominent cyberthieves complained about what they called a serious decline in the number of identities worth stealing. They called for financial institutions to institute measures that would warn or "tag" particularly worthless identities, enabling hackers to focus their energies elsewhere.

"You go through these so-called identities, and you realize there are millions of Americans out there who literally have no life," said one identity thief in attendance. "No wonder the ‘Star Wars’ movies do so well."

Elsewhere, the Labor Department reported that unemployment surged by 300,000 this month, but attributed the increase to lawyers fired by Michael Jackson.

Andy Borowitz is the author of The Borowitz Report, and the winner of the National Press Club's humor award. For more, go to borowitzreport.com

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

[2000AD]

There's an annual convention?!?!
And the police don't think to turn up?

[Raxmei]

Notice that this is written on the Satire page. Other articles written by Andy Borowitz are similarly nonserious.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

This is clearly a joke, because 1. This was placed in Off-Topic, not N&P, and 2. the last two lines.