A Phenix City, Alabama, resident was sentenced yesterday to serve 111 months in prison for her role in a more than $3 million Stolen Identity Refund Fraud (SIRF) tax scheme. Carnesha Alexander was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $840,692. On Feb. 5, a…
IRS’s Top Ten Identity Theft Prosecutions
Continuing its enforcement push against refund fraud and identity theft, the Internal Revenue Service announced the Top Ten Identity Theft Prosecutions for Fiscal Year 2014 (FY14). The ongoing efforts to bring identity thieves to justice remains a significant priority as part of the IRS’s comprehensive identity theft strategy focusing on preventing, detecting and resolving identity…
Toys ‘R Us asks loyalty card holders to change passwords
Susan Tampor writes: I received a “Security Update” last week via e-mail regarding the rewards program that I signed up for several years ago at Toys R Us. Given all the scams, I wondered whether this notice was some kind of trick. But it was legitimate. […] Kathleen Waugh, vice president of corporate communications for…
Possible ISIS group hacks into 2 local websites
KSDK staff report: Two local websites are back up and running after they were hacked by a group that claimed to be the Middle East terror organization ISIS. The two companies that were impacted were MERS Goodwill and a local digital agency named Elasticity. Early Friday morning, web users who went to the site saw…
The best laid plans, derailed by DDoS
So I had planned to spend some time this weekend working on a post about why I think Rogers was incorrect when they claimed “no personal data” was acquired by TeamHans in a recent hack reported on this site. My plans were derailed a few days ago when my sites were suddenly no longer reachable. It…
MX: Vivanuncios user data stolen by hacker (nah – scraped by competitor)
Update/Clarification: eBay reached out to DataBreaches.net to ask that we make clear that the breach did not occur after eBay purchased the site, but rather, it occurred while it was still on the W3 system – before eBay bought it. eBay also notes that “we launched an entirely new platform on January 15, 2015 when the acquisition was…