Driving around Seattle with “Alice,” a convicted ID thief who didn’t want her own identity revealed, was an education.

“She knew where all the places where to go … the easiest cars to break into,” Shadel said.

Driving around a parking lot, Alice pointed out the cars she would likely target.

“Out-of-state plate, so we are probably going to hit that car because it’s parked over in the corner,” she said. “It’s easy to get into without somebody seeing.”

The out-of-state license plate signaled to Alice that the driver had probably traveled with lots of personal information.

She also pointed out seemingly unlikely targets, like work vans. “They usually had like full on credit cards to bill companies,” she said.

And cars with backpacks that are sitting out in the open. “It’s just full of goodies. It always is.”

In just a few months Alice and her colleagues stole $900,000, Shadel said, noting that “she had a little group.”

“One guy who could make IDs. Another who knew how to swipe all the laptops and put them up in the cloud. It was quite a little posse of identity thieves,” Shadel said.

Identity theft affects more than 16 million Americans each year to the tune of $24.7 billion, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It is the single largest type of property crime.

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