Ten Easy Ways To Reduce Property Crime and Fraud

1. Require small telecom providers to adopt anti-spoofing technology for Caller ID.

Lots of serious fraud occurs via junk calls with spoofed source numbers that makes the offenders hard to trace. Anti-spoofing technologies have been adopted by most large telecom providers, but this has just shifted spoofing to numbers from small telecom providers that haven't kept up.

2. Require PINs for in person and automated online credit card purchases

Requiring a personal identification number to use a credit card dramatically reduces credit card fraud.

3. Put trackers in almost all cars, in expensive bicycles, and in almost all laptops and smart phones.

Location tracking devices in hard to quickly remove places can make it easier to catch car and bicycle thieves, potentially shutting down entire theft rings. 

This has been quite effective for cell phones and laptops. 

Ideally, this could include hard to remove trackers in catalytic converters that are a frequent target of thefts. 

4. Legalize marijuana industry banking access.

The exclusion of the gray market marijuana industry from access to banking has greatly increased the use of cash in the economy, and cash is inherently vulnerable to theft and fraud relative to electronic money transfers with credit cards, debit cards, funds deposited in bank accounts, wire transfers, and person to person apps like Zelle and Venmo. 

Giving this industry access to the mainstream banking industry would take a lot of cash out of the economy and thereby reduce property crime and also of violent robberies of people carrying cash to make gray market marijuana purchases.

5. Use more forensics in burglary investigations

Pilot projects in Denver using DNA testing and fingerprint searches in forensic crime investigation normally reserved for murder and rape cases proved very effective at catching the small number of high frequency burglars that account for a large share of all burglaries.

But, despite great successes that made a real dent in Denver burglary rates when it was attempted, the effort seems to have been abandoned and has not be widely copied.

6. Devote more resources to locating online resellers of stolen goods.

Grassroots efforts, for example, of stolen bicycles, often alter law enforcement to online fencing of stolen goods, but agencies often lack the resources to follow up on this information. A federal agency focused on this inherently non-geographic task could improve the ability to law enforcement to react quickly and effectively to such tips, and to catch online fencing of stolen goods even without citizen tips.

7. Randomly include trackers in a modest percentage of delivered packages in problem areas, and use this information together with security camera data to catch porch pirates.

Porch pirates typically steal many packages over an extended period of time. So, catching a single porch pirate in an area where this has been a problem, can prevent large numbers of larceny incidents. Including trackers in even a small percentage of packages in problem areas (perhaps 1%-5%) could make the whole course of criminal conduct much more risky for would be porch pirates, discouraging it in the first place, and would also help a great deal (together with other tools like security cameras on porches) to identify and prosecute porch pirates.

Just a handful of major delivery companies would have to cooperate for this approach to be very effective, and doing so would help customers trust buying goods delivered in this manner.

8. More effectively blacklist fraudsters.

Fraud enforcement is very fragmented. It is divided among myriad occupational licensing organizations in different occupations, among myriad local, state and federal law enforcement agencies with multiple agencies addressing different kinds of fraud at the state and federal level, and private civil lawsuits as well, in addition to a reputational network on the Internet and in old school institutions like the Better Business Bureau. 

But fraudsters can often move one kind of fraud to another one nimbly.

Coordinating separate databases of fraud offenders into a shared common database used to deny them all relevant occupational licenses and to flag their credit scores could make it significantly harder for them to be recidivists.

9. Establish an agency that can identify patterns and networks of fraud activity in social media, and take effective action based upon it.

Regular uses of social media learn to quickly identify common styles of fraud driven efforts to contact users of social media. 

Improving the ability of these platforms and law enforcement agencies to identify these practices and investigate their often common sources and shut them down, while something of a whack a mole effort, could certainly be improved with a federal agency more focused on developing the relationships with the platforms, and the investigational practices and tools, needed to effectively take down these perennial offenders, and to recommend where reforms are needed to be more effective at combating these problems.

10. Legalize one party consent to recording telephone communications.

Recording conversations with fraudsters who haven't been alerted to the fact that they are being recorded is an effective and widely technologically available citizen tool to generate the proof needed to convict them. But they shouldn't be able to hide behind outdated two party consent to record statutes that make it harder to legally generate this information that turn citizen tips to law enforcement into crimes of their own.