On 25 February the Organised Crime Unit of the Hellenic Police arrested 11 members of an international organised crime group involved in stealing and falsifying travel documents to facilitate for profit the movement of illegal third-country nationals through Europe. During the course of this Europol-supported investigation, police officers identified members of the criminal organisation and…
Category: ID Theft
Russian computer hackers in Colorado sold stolen credit card numbers for $3.6 million
Kirk Mitchell reports: Russian computer hackers operating in Colorado and 15 other states used data-mining viruses to steal thousands of credit card numbers from U.S. residents in 20 states and sold them on the darknet for more than $3.6 million, according to federal court documents. As part of the wide-scale criminal operation, so-called “carders” from…
Half A Million People Don’t Know Criminals Stole Their Identities to Get Jobs
Jack Corrigan reports: A programming error kept the IRS from notifying hundreds of thousands of identity theft victims about criminals using their Social Security numbers to get themselves jobs in 2017, according to an internal investigation. Last year, more than half a million Americans had their identities used by others to get hired, but only…
ICE lawyer in Seattle charged with stealing immigrants’ identities
AP reports: The chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle has been charged with stealing immigrants’ identities. Raphael A. Sanchez, who resigned from the agency effective Monday, faces one count of aggravated identity theft and another of wire fraud in a charging document filed Monday in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors with the…
California DMV worker used driver’s license records to steal identities, federal government says
Sam Stanton reports: A worker at California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, which is the subject on an ongoing federal bribery probe into the misuse of department computer files, has been accused of using driver’s license records in an elaborate mail and identity theft case. Sarah Laray Sandoval, 39, was a DMV employee with access to…
Biometric data theft: Two more arrested in India
Yagnesh Bharat Mehta reports that there have been two more arrests in a case previously noted on this site. The case involves the theft of biometric data for illegally acquiring food grains meant for registered beneficiaries of the the National Food Security Act. It’s really not clear (to me or law enforcement, it seems) how…