A Department of Veterans Affairs worker has been sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for stealing personal information from disabled North Carolina veterans to generate bogus tax returns. Michael Ray Woods, 48, of Fayetteville, was convicted in February of 12 counts of preparing false tax returns, 10 counts of wire fraud, 10 counts of…
Category: U.S.
FL: Pasco County diners become credit card fraud victims
Jamie Klein reports: Eight local victims of credit card fraud had one thing in common: They had eaten at the Mugs n’ Jugs restaurant on U.S. 19 in Port Richey before noticing fake charges on their cards. Authorities say former Mugs n’ Jugs waitress Kathryn Shana’e Perez used a “skimmer,” a scanning device that captures…
Officials: S.J. ringmaster used inside help to steal more than $200K from TD Bank customer accounts
Jim Walsh reports: For more than two years, Kashon Adade sent many customers to TD Bank offices in South Jersey, authorities say. But all that business wasn’t welcome. Investigators claim Adade ran a bank-fraud ring that relied on insider help and identity theft to drain about $200,000 from the accounts of unsuspecting TD Bank customers….
AntiSec hackers release ‘largest cache yet’ of law enforcement data
Zack Whittaker reports: Hackers associated with the AntiSec movement — a LulzSec and Anonymous combined effort to breach systems with weak security — have released a 10GB in size cache of data belonging to law enforcement. Known as ‘Shooting Sherrifs Saturday’, this follows ‘F**k FBI Friday’ in June, where LulzSec published hundreds of hacked usernames,…
University of Arizona responds to email hack
DA Morales reports on an email hack that didn’t involve any PII but serves as a reminder that you can have a long passphrase or great password, but that’s not enough: The computer security at the UA seems tough to beat, or so it seemed until last night. If you have ever had to set…
(Follow-up) Kaiser employee ID theft suspect pleads no contest
C. Johnson reports: A benefits clerk, who was busted while about to undergo liposuction surgery using fraudulently-obtained credit card information from one of her victims, has pleaded no contest to identity theft. The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office says Mia Garza, 31, was accused of stealing personal identification information from more than 400 Kaiser Permanente…