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Tall, white-haired and bearded, the real Edward M. Peters Jr. looks the part of a medieval-history scholar--especially in his cluttered office, where towering shelves of books include a few volumes of his own with titles like Inquisition and Torture. At lunch in the University of Pennsylvania's faculty dining room in downtown Philadelphia, the professor lights up a Chesterfield, orders crab cakes and a martini, and says he'd like to "beat the hell out of the crook" who stole his identity.

The inmate known as Edward M. Peters Jr. is shorter by several inches and younger by a dozen years, with a beard just beginning to gray. His real name--the one that appears on his economics degree from Syracuse University--is Roger Cullen. But Peters was the alias on the warrant when he was arrested, so Peters is his name in Delaware's prison records. "When I go to see him, I have to ask for Ed Peters," says his lawyer.

That name was just one of dozens that Roger Cullen and his wife, Cheryl, adopted during an identity-theft spree that spanned at least six years and seven states. A modern-day Bonnie and Clyde armed with vital statistics rather than automatic pistols, they hit banks and credit card companies for tens--possibly hundreds--of thousands of dollars, and jeopardized the financial life of each of their victims.

An escalating threat

The Cullens' story--the ease with which they morphed from one purloined identity to another and the serendipity of their ultimate arrest--is an indisputable warning: Identity theft is becoming more and more pervasive as government and business increasingly rely on numbers to identify citizens and consumers, and as technology simplifies the collection and dissemination of personal information. A support group for identity-theft victims founded last fall by CalPIRG, a California consumer-advocacy organization, received 8,000 to 10,000 calls for help in its first six months. Trans Union, one of the three major credit bureaus, says calls to its fraud division have risen from 300 a month in 1992 to 40,000 a month this year.

For victims, unraveling the damage typically takes a minimum of several days of phone calls and paperwork when the fraud involves just a credit card or two. But for those whose names are used to open checking accounts, rent apartments, or get driver's licenses or jobs, the cleanup can be a devastating burden that never ends (see the box on page 70). Stained records play havoc with victims' attempts to rent an apartment, get phone service, open a bank account, cash a check or qualify for a loan. If the thief uses your name to get a job, the IRS can come after you for tax due on the earnings. The worst of all scenarios: You could be arrested for crimes committed in your name.

So maybe the real Edward Peters was lucky. Apart from Delaware's prison records, his name has appeared on at least one fraudulent bank account, a drunk-driving citation in Maryland, and arrest warrants in Delaware, Florida and Tennessee. Amazingly, he was unaware of any of this until a phone call from Kiplinger's broke the news. The arrest warrants have been withdrawn, eliminating the most hair-raising hazard: "Poor Edward Peters. He runs a red light in Florida and eight cops are ready to shoot him if he sneezes," says Detective Scott Garland, one of the Delaware state troopers who apprehended the Cullens.

Peters and most of the others the Cullens impersonated had a common bond: They were profiled in Who's Who in America, a directory of prominent Americans that includes biographical information such as birth date, place of birth, mother's maiden name and home address. "It gives enough information in the biography to request a copy of a birth certificate," Roger Cullen says in a videotaped police interview obtained by Kiplinger's. Not surprisingly, the Cullens racked up a rather distinguished list of victims. "These are all people who obviously are creditworthy," Roger says.

(The Cullens declined requests for interviews. But Roger relented just before we went to press; see the box "Roger and me". Most of the details in this story come from police and court records and from interviews with police, attorneys, victims and others connected with the case.)

Fire? What fire?

The Cullens' life on the run ended March 19, 1997, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Detectives Scott Garland and Dennis Spillan met eye-stinging smoke the moment they burst through the door of the Cullens' home, a nicely furnished Victorian on the Chesapeake Bay. It was about 8:30 A.M., and the Cullens acted as if they'd just been awakened. "She turns over like she's just getting up and there's black soot around her nose and mouth," says Garland. "I ask, `Where's the fire?' And she says, `What fire?'"

In a second-floor bathroom, the tub and sink were clogged with water and charred paper. A blue plastic trashcan stuffed with smoldering papers had melted in on itself, ironically preserving the contents. In a three-and-a-half-hour search, the detectives seized boxes of bank checks, birth certificates, marriage and driver's licenses, gift certificates, mailbox rental contracts--and about $6,000 in cash.

The only clues to the Cullens' true identities--an anniversary card and some errand lists--were found in a night-stand drawer. The names on the arrest warrant were Edward M. Peters and Patricia Ann Mathews, names the pair had repeatedly used.

They were charged with financial crimes committed in Delaware in 1996 and 1997, but court records show a much longer criminal trail. Roger was arrested under an alias in Florida in 1992 on charges of fraud and forgery--and jumped bail. He pleaded guilty in 1986 to charges of breach of trust in Tennessee, and was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay restitution of $12,500. He never fully paid, according to a 1990 arrest warrant. Since 1993 Florida has been after Cheryl for fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.

"I'm sure there are many unsolved cases that we don't know about," says Garland. "A lot of banks don't even report fraud. They write off the loss and never file a report."

Anatomy of a bank fraud

The checks started bouncing on October 14, 1996. Over the previous seven days, "Patricia Mathews" had deposited 11 checks totaling $20,555 into her checking account at Wilmington Trust Co.--all written on a long-closed, out-of-state account in the name of William M. Cash. "Mathews" began drawing against the deposits right away, even though the checks hadn't cleared--and never would.

She hauled in nearly $19,000 from checks, ATM withdrawals and debit-card purchases before the account was frozen on October 15. The largest draws, ranging from $2,594 to $4,110, were cash advances at Atlantic City casinos and a racetrack in Dover. The Cullens didn't go to gamble. Rather, they were following the dictum of Depression-era thief Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because that's where the money was. "At a casino, you can draw out thousands at a time," explains Roger. "At an ATM, you can get only $500 a day."

The Cullens had opened the "William M. Cash" account at Membership Bank, in Portland, Ore., years earlier and had written a few bad checks before the bank closed it around 1994. But they still had a supply of leftover checks. (When we called the real William M. Cash, a historian listed in Who's Who, he had no inkling his identity had been filched.)

Wilmington Trust also took a hit in Edward Peters's name. I had gotten maybe $10,000 out of that account," Cullen says in the police interview. He also acknowledges similar frauds against the Ocean City and Denton branches of the First National Bank of Maryland and PNC Bank in Maryland.

Though neither Cash nor Peters was burned by the Cullens' crimes, either could have been pegged as a bad-check writer in a check-verification database, such as the ones maintained by TeleCheck and Equifax Check Services. Deadbeats are identified by name, account number, driver's-license number and sometimes social security number, so bad checks "could be tied back to the real consumer if the numbers are the same," says Jalinna Jones, a spokeswoman for TeleCheck. Merchants often consult such databases before accepting checks, and banks review them before opening new accounts.

A con artist's gift plan

In another con that spanned eight months in 1996, the Cullens added a fillip to the garden-variety credit card fraud. Using names from Who's Who, they applied by mail for credit cards at Lowe's Home Center and received at least nine--five in women's names arid four in men's names. All were sent to the same address, a mail drop in Seaford, Del. Instead of charging merchandise, they used the cards at various Lowe's stores to buy $100 and $300 gift certificates made out to Ed and Patricia Peters or David and Pat Williams, another pair of regular aliases. The certificates were signed from "Dad" or "Mom and Dad."

The next move was to buy a big-ticket item--a VCR, for instance--that cost slightly more than the value of the gift certificate, so that the receipt would reflect payment in cash. Soon after, they'd return the merchandise for a cash refund. "The reason we picked Lowe's is we used to actually shop at Lowe's before we did any of this--for garden hoses, patio furniture, stuff like that," Cullen says, in a peculiar expression of customer loyalty.

The Who's Who biographies weren't all the Cullens needed to get the fraudulent credit cards. "Even though we had all this information, the key was to have a social security number," Cullen says. "It had to match when they drew the credit report." But getting that was easy. They simply wrote to state motor-vehicle departments to request a copy of each individual's driver's record, concentrating on states where the social security number appears in the file or on the license itself. "Eighty percent of the time you get it back," Cullen says. Occasionally a state required the Cullens to get the driver's approval before releasing the file. In those cases they just moved on to the next victim.

The Driver's Privacy Protection Act, which took effect last year, is supposed to block public access to drivers' records. But there are loopholes. "You can simply say this person owes me money or scraped my car in the parking lot," says Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal. False statements are illegal but often go unchallenged.

Although they needed a real social security number to get a credit card, the Cullens could use phony numbers to open bank accounts. But they needed a driver's license or other photo ID linked to their bogus names. Who's Who biographies provided everything they needed to request a copy of a birth certificate, short of the address of the appropriate vital-statistics agency. With birth certificate in hand, they could apply in person to the state motor-vehicle department--initially even taking a driving test and later simply trading in a license from another state. At one point, they even got (re)married under false names in the Denton, Md., town hall, so that Cheryl Cullen could use the marriage certificate to get a driver's license in a new name. "You pay your $25 and it's a ten-minute thing," Roger Cullen explains.

Marquis, the company that publishes the Who's Who directories, says it "is certainly not our intention to be a resource for identity thieves." And Fred Marks, the publication's senior managing editor, says those featured in the directories are free to leave out any details.

"It's not prudent to have all that biographical information there," warns a now-chastened Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, in New York City, and one of the Cullens' victims.

It could have been worse

Mary Anne Pennington, executive director of the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, discovered a $2,000 blot on her credit history at the worst possible time: when she was trying to refinance her mortgage late last year. Removing the illicit Lowe's account from her credit report was a two-week "bureaucratic nightmare." In the end Pennington got the mortgage, but she is perturbed that Lowe's, which was aware fraud was involved, besmirched the victim's credit record.

She's also concerned about what might come up in the future, and with good reason. A few years ago Pennington got a nasty surprise--an audit notice from the IRS--after someone used her name and social security number to get a job.

Each year employers report your earnings to the Social Security Administration (SSA), which credits the amount to your earnings history. If a crook uses your name and number, you'll get credit for his "earnings." But that's not good: The SSA forwards the information to the IRS, which expects you to have paid taxes on the income.

It's up to you to report errors in your earnings history to the SSA, which is then responsible for untangling the records. That worked for Pennington.

Police files identified at least 19 aliases the Cullens used, and there were probably more. Kiplinger's spoke with a dozen of their victims. General Electric's chief financial officer, Dennis Dammerman, said through a spokesman that he was aware of a bank-related fraud in his name (Cullen denies it was him). But Dammerman may not know that Cullen was once employed using his name. Assuming Cullen used a bogus social security number, his pay would not have found its way onto Dammerman's earnings history.

Others who said they had to straighten out their credit reports include George Harmon, the president of Millsaps College; James Achord, a professor of medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center; Patrick Sidders, a Minneapolis marketing executive; and Lisa Eichelberger, a professor of nursing at Clayton College and State University, in Atlanta.

While snaring a growing list of prominent victims, the Cullens were also sporadically employed--Roger sold advertising and Cheryl sold cosmetics for L'Oreal. But the identity-theft "income" was essential to their lifestyle. The furniture in the three-story home where they were arrested had been purchased with bad checks, police say (except for a 32-inch television that Cheryl received as a prize for selling cosmetics).

They drove big cars--a 1985 Buick Riviera and a 1985 Lincoln Continental--and traveled to Cancun, Mexico, shortly before they were arrested. "That was strictly vacation--to get away and get things off our minds," Roger Cullen told the police.

They almost got away with it

Detectives Garland and Spillan worked separately on the Wilmington Trust and Lowe's cases for months before they realized they were pursuing the same suspects. Spillan became almost obsessed with a collection of copies of driver's licenses the Cullens had obtained using aliases. "I kept piling up their faces and they sat on my desk looking at me," he says.

But two months after joining forces with Garland, who works 70 miles away in Georgetown, Del., Spillan almost gave up the chase. To complete the report that would have closed the case, he rechecked the license-tag number on a blue-green Buick Riviera that had been spotted in a Lowe's parking lot. Records showed that insurance on the car had been sold by an agent in Dover and, when Spillan called, the agent had just received a fax from the Cullens (whom he knew as the Williamses).

That was the lucky break. Spillan traced the fax to a store in Kent County, Md., which borders Delaware. The Cullens were gone by the time the local sheriff got there, but deputies cruising surrounding neighborhoods spotted the Riviera outside the Cullens' home.

From 9 o'clock that night until 8:30 the next morning, sheriff's deputies stood watch outside the house while the Delaware cops jumped through hoops to get out-of-state search warrants. At about 5:30 A.m. deputies reported "heavy movement" inside the house. "Every minute that went by, we were thinking, There goes another document. It took forever to get the warrants," Garland says.

Time served

By mid June, both Roger and Cheryl Cullen will be out of prison. Each was charged in the U.S. District Court of Delaware with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and credit card fraud. In January 1998 Cheryl pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit credit card and bank fraud, and was sentenced to 11 months in prison--which included time served before the guilty plea--plus four months in a halfway house. At her sentencing, she said she looked forward "to distancing myself from my husband."

Roger pleaded guilty to credit card fraud and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, which included time served. He's due to be released in June from the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky., a prison facility for inmates who need medical care. Records in Delaware say Cullen suffers from "chronic liver disease secondary to alcohol abuse."

In the police interview Cullen says he began using false identities because his drinking caused him to lose his driver's license and his job with Dun & Bradstreet, which sells commercial credit reports. He got his first fake license, he says, so he could get a new job.

The Cullens were also placed on probation for three years and ordered to pay $18,880 in restitution to Wilmington Trust and $13,470 to Lowe's. An amount not less than $100 a month is supposed to be withheld from any income they earn.

The Cullens are unlikely to face additional prosecution, even though they've been wanted (under various names) in several states. For instance, "Edward Peters" was wanted in Tennessee on forgery and theft charges, "but it's nothing they would extradite on," says Matt Howell, an investigator with the Johnson City, Tenn., police department.

"The punishment doesn't seem commensurate with the offense," says assistant U.S. attorney Richard Andrews, who prosecuted the case. "They were freeloaders on society for a good long time." But in most states catching and prosecuting them has been a low priority for police because they never bilked one bank for extraordinary losses or stayed in one place for very long.

Aside from state and local police departments--which sometimes have just a single detective assigned to financial crimes--the U.S. Secret Service and FBI investigate identity theft and related fraud. But they concentrate on fraud rings and big-money cases."The Cullens finally got caught because the Delaware police showed a lot of determination," Andrews says. "Normally, check and credit card fraud is not a high priority for police."

Postscript: The physical chore of cleaning up the mess after the Cullens were led from their rental home in handcuffs fell to Cynthia Miller, their landlady. She gave away some of the furniture and other possessions the chameleon couple had left behind, sold others and tossed out the rest, including--in an act of poetic justice--the Cullens' wedding photos and other artifacts of their true identity.

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