About (more...)
Thomas L. Sheer—Founder and President
For 25 years he led a storied career with the FBI, culminating in his leadership of the Bureaus New York office, where he successfully tackled the citys five organized crime families and was awarded the prestigious FBI Medal of Valor. Prior to joining the FBI, Tom served as an officer in the US Marines Corps. Before forming Sheer Investigations, he led security efforts at such well-known companies WR Grace and Mirage Casinos and Resorts.
Sean M. Sheer—Director of Operations
He studied business continuity, security, emergency response, and fire safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he completed his Masters Degree in Protection Management and Emergency Response.
Sean is also a former award-winning journalist.
Regions (more...)
Take a closer look at the geographic locations of our more than 70 expert investigators, fanned out from the Florida Keys to Louisiana.
Services (more...)
Discover the scope of services Sheer Investigations offers everyone from investigative agencies and attorneys to individuals and large businesses.
Avoiding Identity Theft
INTRODUCTION
Identity theft is a major financial problem in the United States, primarily because it is a very easy crime to commit. If no one has obtained credit in your name or used your credit card information to make illicit purchases you have indeed been very lucky.
My name is Mike Willis and I am a retired United States Postal Inspector. I investigated ID theft, among other crimes, for over thirty years. As I said, the reason ID theft is so prevalent is because it is so easy. If you have someone else’s identifying information, i.e. their date of birth, Social Security Number, credit account numbers, etc., pretending to be that person is not hard. It is well within the capabilities of even many intellectually challenged criminals. Protecting that information is impossible. Yes, I said impossible. Read on, please.
I am very particular with taking precautions with my credit cards and despite that my credit card has been cloned three times. Each time someone got my credit card information and made several charges in a two day period. Each time I still had the credit card in my wallet and some criminal somewhere was making charges on it. They had imprinted the magnetic strip on their card with the data from the magnetic strip on my card. That is called cloning. It was very upsetting. You may have experienced the same thing.
