Ten people have been indicted on federal identity theft and fraud charges by a task force designed to tackle a persistent problem in the Islands, the U.S. attorney's office said yesterday.

The Hawai'i Identity Theft and Fraud Task Force is a group of state, federal, and county law enforcement officials organized in October 2004 at the request of the U.S. attorney, Honolulu Police Chief Boisse Correa and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Of the 10 people indicted, three — including a pair wanted for allegedly bilking a retired Big Island couple out of more than $150,000 — are still at large. The indictments represent a crackdown on repeat identity thieves and financial-fraud purveyors, the U.S. attorney's office said.

The goal of the task force is to help local law enforcement target career criminals and the most egregious offenders by utilizing federal fraud and identity theft laws, which require a much lower burden of proof than state laws.

"A lot of these perpetrators don't stop," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Wes Porter, who along with fellow federal prosecutor Ron Johnson will help prosecute the cases. "They get out (of jail) and they go right back to what they know. We're going to use the law to bring cases not normally (seen) in federal court to get them (the defendants) out of our community."

Prosecutors will be using the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act of 2004, which states, "that whoever commits certain types of fraud using the identification information of another without permission, shall receive a two-year mandatory sentence in addition to any other sentence imposed for the fraud," said U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo.

"We asked HPD to give us their top 10 to 20 (identity thieves and fraud purveyors), and cases that they don't feel they can get a handle on," said Johnson. "(The task force) is designed to get the most appropriate sentence for the violation."

As part of the task force, a U.S. postal inspector has been embedded with the HPD's financial fraud and white-collar crime unit for more than a year.

Inspector John Murphy acts as a filter, according to the U.S. attorney's office, by sorting through the more than 400 fraud and ID theft cases the department opens each month.

Murphy works with HPD's task force members to identify cases that could be prosecuted federally. He also gathers evidence and facilitates the hand-off from state investigators to federal prosecutors.

"We figured out we were investigating the same people," said Murphy, who previously headed the Massachusetts state ID theft task force. "We're taking a joint approach to this."

Those indicted also include a Waikiki bar bouncer who sold more than 300 stolen or confiscated ID cards for $2,500, and a man who allegedly stole mail in Lanikai while searching for new credit cards and ATM pin numbers in residents' mailboxes. He then allegedly used the credit cards to run up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges.

Reach Peter Boylan at pboylan@honoluluadvertiser.com.