Loss Prevention: Social Media Aids Law Enforcement Across State Lines
There has been much discussion about the use of the Internet, social media and other technologies by criminals to organize multi-state or multi-national organized crime rings. However, forward-thinking security, loss prevention and law enforcement professionals are identifying ways to use the same technologies to cooperate across state lines and share critical information that will both solve and reduce crime.
For Harborstone Credit Union, a community-based cooperative with $750 million in assets and 52,000 members in Tacoma, Wash., what began as an investigation into a $5,000 fraudulent transaction quickly led to an investigative path across multiple states, using numerous traditional and innovative social technologies to identify a federal parolee running a sophisticated, million dollar, national identity theft ring — all of which could not have been accomplished just months prior.