Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 5:43 am
INFO-BROKER CHOICEPOINT DIVULGES PRIVATE DATA TO FRAUDSTERS, by Charles Carreon
8:53 pm, February 17, 2005
8:53 pm, February 17, 2005
Wall Street Journal
Identity Theft Puts Pressure on Data Sellers
By EVAN PEREZ Staff Reporter
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 18, 2005
ChoicePoint, a fast-growing repository of information ranging from driving and property records to insurance claims, said scammers posing as legitimate businesses opened 50 accounts and obtained access to various databases used for pre-employment background checks and public records searches.
”We think it's just the tip of the iceberg,“ said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Paul Denn.
The sheriff's office charged a 41-year-old Nigerian man, Olatunji Oluwatosin, with six felony counts including identity theft. Yesterday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Mr. Oluwatosin pleaded no contest to a single count of unlawful use of personal identification, and was sentenced to 16 months in state prison. Michael Enger, a public defender who represented him, said investigators won't get any help from his client. ”He's not cooperating in any way whatsoever,“ he said.
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Investigators said they believe data on up to 400,000 individuals may have been compromised. Police are seeking others involved in the alleged scam. ChoicePoint disputes that number and contends that closer to 145,000 personal records may have been breached, some of them duplicative. The Alpharetta, Ga., company has notified those it believes may have been affected. Police are still investigating to determine whether the identity thefts resulted in any financial losses.
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Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, yesterday ordered his staff to study possible legislation that would expand the Federal Trade Commission's regulatory power to oversee information brokers the way it does companies that handle financial and medical records.
ChoicePoint was also the subject of controversy in 2000 over the involvement of a subsidiary, Database Technologies, in a purge by the state of Florida of alleged felons on its voter rolls. It was later discovered that many of those purged in fact weren't felons and actually had the right to vote.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., a non-profit privacy watchdog group, wrote to the FTC in December seeking an investigation of ChoicePoint and other companies for compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires credit-report providers to vouch for the accuracy of their information. Now, he says, ”this ends the discussion on whether self-regulation works."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, recently introduced a bill that would require notification of consumers when their personal data have been compromised. A similar law in California, the only one in the nation, is the reason why ChoicePoint's fraud case came to light. The company said that even though the requirement to notify affected consumers exists only in California, it is notifying consumers throughout the U.S.
The current investigation involving ChoicePoint began in October when the company found the 50 accounts it said were fraudulent. According to the company and police, criminals opened the accounts, posing as businesses seeking information on potential employees and customers. They paid fees of $100 to $200, and provided fake documentation, gaining access to a trove of personal data including addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers.
The account holders then made unauthorized address changes on at least 750 people, according to California police. Identity thieves often use this method to establish credit accounts that they can then use to make fraudulent charges, though it isn't clear whether any bogus charges were made in these specific cases before discovery of the fraud.
ChoicePoint, which was spun off from credit-report company Equifax in 1997, has rapidly transformed itself into a provider of information to various industries, from direct marketers to insurance companies and law enforcement. In the U.S., the company says it stores 19 billion public records.
Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Provided for Fair Use Purposes pursuant to 17 USC Section 108.