Personal information belonging to more than a million Oregonians could be in the hands of criminals, deputies say.
Sheriff’s detectives arrested Tim Nuss on April 28 in east Multnomah County. They say he had access to an old Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles database.
Spokesman David House says the DMV database was once sold to marketing companies, but the department stopped selling the information in the late 1990s.
House says the sold data include the names, addresses, birth dates, gender and ages of people who registered with the DMV, but no financial information.
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Prosecutors have charged Nuss with 26 counts of aggravated identity theft — one count for each letter of the alphabet representing his potential victims.
Read more on KPTV.
So how much did the state make by selling the lists and how much has that sale cost in terms of ID theft or state personnel time investigating crimes that used these lists? And no, I won’t even ask what recourse victims have, because we all know that individuals generally have no real recourse or private cause of action.