From: "Phil Payne" 

> How many people here have had their identity stolen?

A long, long time ago.  Probably 1980/81.

We held a dinner party when I lived in Frankfurt - around twenty guests.  A
couple of days later my bank manager (Deutsche Bank) called and asked if
I'd been gambling.  I said no, and he asked me to go to a nearby branch of
the bank and ID someone presenting one of my cheques.

It turned out that one of the guests had stolen my cheques (they're loose
in Germany, not in a book) and my passport, and had been gambling in a
casino in Wiesbaden.  The casino owner may have had his suspicions, since
he drove 35 miles to present the cheques at the Deutsche Bank "Filial
im Grnen", Frankfurt/Niederrad.  Unfortunately for him that was my
branch and the manager knew me.

So: "Do you know that guy over there?"

"No."

"OK - I'm going to press the button."

Within less than two minutes two Peterwagens showed up with four cops
carrying Heckler & Koch submachine guns.

The thief's name was Connie Mehn.  He'd come to the dinner party as the
boyfriend of one of the single women in the neighbourhood - Krystle.  He
carried on using my cheques for a couple of weeks around Germany - each
time a cheque was presented the bank paid it out of my account and I had to
go and repudiate the signature (nothing at all like mine - no attempt at
forgery) but I wound up with SERIOUS bank charges (couple of thousand GBP)
and some real issues with credit for a few months.

He was finally arrested in Darmstadt and, as the Germans say, "der
Stadtsanwalt ermittelte".

Went on for months, until I got a letter from the Stadtsanwalt Darmstadt
(kinda like the DA in the USA) saying that the penalties he was likely to
face in my case were trivial compared with other offences.  He was tried
for culpable manslaughter in Darmstadt and given twenty years.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5