The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced a slew of indictments today. Here’s one that involved a government database:
United States v. Cora Eutsay, Case No. 15-2250-MJ-Turnoff
Cora Eutsay, 50, of Miami, was charged by criminal complaint with trafficking in and using unauthorized access devices to obtain anything of value, aggregating $1,000 or more in a one year period.
As alleged in the complaint, Eutsay worked for CareerSource South Florida in the Opa Locka office. During her employment, Eutsay sought and inappropriately obtained access to the Department of Children and Families’ ACCESS Florida System, a State database containing the personally identifying information, including names, dates of birth, and social security numbers (“PII”) of individuals who applied for public benefits in Florida. Eutsay’s employment credentials were used on several occasions to run queries in the ACCESS Florida database for the PII of persons who had previously applied for public benefits. Eutsay then sold the PII of more than 200 individuals.
And here’s a related prosecution:
United States v. Kyron Jonathon Nedd, Case No. 15-2426-MJ-Goodman
On April 1, 2015, Kyron Jonathan Nedd, 22, of Miami Gardens, was charged by criminal complaint for his participation in a stolen identity tax fraud scheme.
According to the criminal complaint, between February 1, 2014 and July 18, 2014, a total of 379 fraudulent federal income tax returns, for tax year 2013, were filed with the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) from Nedd’s residence in Miami Gardens. The returns claimed $843,295 in tax refunds. The IRS refunded approximately $64,557 for those fraudulently filed tax returns.
On February 12, 2015, a federal search warrant was executed at Nedd’s residence, where agents discovered items containing personal identification information (“PII”) – names, dates of birth and social security numbers – of hundreds of individuals. Inside Nedd’s bedroom, law enforcement found a safe with numerous debit cards and computer-generated printouts from the State of Florida Department of Children and Families (“DCF”) database. The printouts contained the name they contained the name “C.Eutsay” at the top of the documents as well as her ID number and system identification number for “Cora Eutsay,” who, as noted above, was charged in a separate criminal complaint in Case No. 15-2250-MJ-Turnoff, with selling PII that she had unlawfully obtained from the DCF database. IRS-CI agents have since determined that there were numerous instances in which the PII contained on the DCF printouts matched up with fraudulent returns filed from Nedd’s residence.
According to the complaint, federal law enforcement agents interviewed Nedd after serving the federal search warrant. Nedd admitted to law enforcement that he electronically filed the income tax returns from his house and that the returns were false and done without the taxpayers’ permission.
The criminal complaint charges the defendant with use of one more unauthorized access devices, possession of fifteen or more unauthorized access devices, and aggravated identity theft.