Chronicles of Twatrick: "Identity fraud" edition.

If you need any more evidence of the utter cluelessness of Lloydminster's Patrick Ross, here, let me help, as it involves Patrick's singular inability to distinguish between the two quite separate violations of identify theft and identify fraud, something that was explained to him years ago but which still seems to elude him.

Most understand the concept of identity theft: the idea that you steal someone's credit card number or bank account number or something similar, all for the sake of personal financial enrichment. We all understand that part, that's not why we're here.

We're here because Patrick Ross is so unspeakably stupid as to think that is the same as identity fraud, which I can assure you is something quite different. Let's start with the definition of identity fraud courtesy of the Criminal Code of Canada, shall we?

Now, while the first part of the explanation of identity fraud seems familiar, it's the highlighted part that is noticeably different from theft. Note well what is so interesting about point (c) -- identity fraud does not require any attempt at personal enrichment. Rather, the definition makes it clear that all it takes to commit identity fraud is to personate someone with the intent of causing them disadvantage, or annoyance, or inconvenience. Did you catch that?

Because what this means is that, in Canada, you are committing identity fraud if you represent yourself as someone else simply because you want to jerk them around and piss them off, examples being, say, signing them up for multiple mailing lists, or posting bogus profiles for them on Grindr, or ... well, you get the idea. There is no need for there to be financial benefit for the perpetrator; all that is required for identity fraud to occur is the intent to "disadvantage" someone in any way.

Which makes Patrick Ross' recent position so amusing, since he seems to be admitting that, yes, he did register a pile of service calls in the name of Peter Skinner (leaving Peter's contact info), which resulted in an annoying number of phone calls. But Patrick's defense is that, hey, one of those calls resulted in Peter being sent a $25 discount coupon for his next service call and, you know, who doesn't want a discount, so Patrick could not possibly be guilty of identity fraud.

I think you see Patrick's impending problem.

It doesn't matter what the end result is if you did not give the other person permission to use your name. If the end result is a never-ending stream of phone calls, or e-mails, or coupons, or offers to clean your ducts, it matters not one whit that there is no financial gain in it for Patrick; all that matters is that he has absolutely committed identity fraud and, just to finish this off, the Criminal Code of Canada takes a dim view of such shenanigans:

And remember, this is a criminal charge, so if Peter decides to be hard-assed about this, it is entirely possible that Patrick could end up with a criminal record, at which point he will find out the hard way just what his travel and employment prospects are.

Any questions?

P.S. If you think I'm kidding about Patrick's cluelessness, well, here's his logic, exactly as I described it above:

Except that is exactly what Patrick was doing; he's just too stupid to understand that it's a crime.