Jay Weaver reports:
A tipster walked into the FBI’s South Florida office a few years ago to complain that young cyber criminals in the North Miami area were using something called a “key” in street lingo to steal people’s identities.
That key, FBI agents would soon figure out, was really a combination of names, birth dates, home addresses and Social Security and driver license numbers — all purloined from five different business and government web sites that were “systematically hacked.”
That discovery led to the November arrests of 18 Miami Dade College students, who were charged with using their financial aid accounts to receive fraudulently obtained tax refunds from the federal government.
But wait, there’s more. This is going on elsewhere and over 1,000 Higher One accounts appear to have been involved.
Read more about this case on Miami Herald.
It would be nice to have some details about how the criminals obtained the identity information used in the tax refund fraud scheme. What businesses or government sites were compromised?