An Ocala police officer and several other people were arrested in an elaborate identity theft scheme, police said.
Investigators said officer Dana Brown collected the personal information of about 149 drivers so that others in the scheme could open 184 bank accounts to cash fraudulent tax return checks.
Police said Brown accessed the information in the Drivers And Vehicle Information Database and gave the information to Riad Sulaiman, who then gave the information to Howayda Hamdan to open the accounts at the bank she worked at.
Read more on WESH.
Somewhat disappointingly, it appears that the Ocala Police Dept. may never have audited access to the database. So for all this time, officers may have been misusing the database for personal, if not criminal, purposes, and the department would have had no idea? As it is, they did not detect this problem. Someone else brought it to law enforcement’s attention.