He was unemployed and receiving welfare, but Adekunle Adetiloye was somehow living lavishly, complete with a Range Rover, extended trips to England and an expensive condominium.
That alone piqued authorities’ interest, but then there were two credit cards tucked away in his wallet that seemed to confirm suspicions that Adetiloye, a Nigerian-born Canadian citizen, was up to something nefarious. The cards each bore different names — Donald Douglas and Vincent Andriole — and helped authorities prosecute a case they describe as one of the largest high-tech bank robberies in U.S. history.
“Characterizing this fraud scheme as massive, if anything, is an understatement,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase of North Dakota said in court documents.
Adetiloye, 30, was sentenced Monday to nearly 18 years in prison on fraud charges. He was convicted of mail fraud, but authorities believe he masterminded a scheme to open nearly 600 fraudulent bank accounts and bilk 22 major banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Federal prosecutor Nick Chase said during the sentencing hearing in North Dakota that Adetiloye had an “insatiable hunger for other people’s money.”
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What if all your private documents are shared across the Internet? What if all your savings are robbed out of your net bank account? What if your mail account has been spammed, or even worse, if your company’s sensitive data has been hacked?
Statistics says India is among the top three countries targeted for phishing attacks. Globally, it is estimated that there are three crore victims of identity theft annually, with losses of nearly Rs.10,00,000 crore to companies.
Has anyone you know ever lost control of a net banking or email or social network account and inadvertently sent spam or worse? Your bank account, money, your photos, your private documents as a whole your identity — if you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password is conned out of you directly through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely held information.
India is one of the countries where the growth of identity fraud is said to be the fastest (at more than 100 per cent). Various banks, enterprises, and government organisations like the Income Tax Department have been targets of multiple phishing attacks over the past two years.
Recently, the government said in a note that 386 phishing incidents were reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) between January and October in 2011.
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As the U.S. invests billions of dollars to convert from paper-based medical records to electronic ones, has the time come to offer everyone a unique health-care identification number?
Proponents say universal patient identifiers, or UPIs, deserve a serious look because they are the most efficient way to connect patients to their medical data. They say UPIs not only facilitate information sharing among doctors and guard against needless medical errors, but may also offer a safety advantage in that health records would never again need to be stored alongside financial data like Social Security numbers. UPIs, they say, would both improve care and lower costs.
Privacy activists aren’t buying it. They say that information from medical records already is routinely collected and sold for commercial gain without patient consent and that a health-care ID system would only encourage more of the same. The result, they say, will be more patients losing trust in the system and hiding things from their doctors, resulting in a deterioration in care. They agree that it’s crucial to move medical records into the digital age. But they say it can be done without resorting to universal health IDs.
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The Better Business Bureau is warning about an identity theft scam targeting Medicare recipients.
The agency said the latest fraud attempt involves calling Medicare consumers. The caller states that they want to send the consumer a “new Medicare card”. They then go over the consumer’s personal information and eventually ask for a checking account number.
The Better Business Bureau said this is not a legitimate phone call.
“We don’t contact the consumer regarding new cards; the consumer would need to contact us,” Medicare officials said.
Consumers are advised to follow these tips:
Verify a source before sharing information.
Safeguard your medical and health insurance information.
Treat your trash carefully.
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After being confined to Spring Arbor Nursing Home for more than a year, Patricia Gipe was eager to regain her independence, her family said.
Gipe hired Tonya Antionette Lloyd, a housekeeper from the nursing home, to help around her house and run a few errands.
Everything seemed fine until a phone call from her bank in November about a suspicious check alerted the 85-year-old woman to the theft of nearly $150,000 from her bank account.
Rocky Mount police arrested Lloyd, 35, on Thursday and charged her with felony obtaining property under false pretenses and three felony counts each of financial card fraud and identity theft. She was jailed in Nash County under a $300,000 secured bond.
“Tonya had Patsy’s trust and she just took advantage of it,” said David Bock, who is married to Gipe’s niece. “This woman is the lowest of the lowest type of criminal to take advantage of an 85-year-old widow.”
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Julie Chambers’ heartbreaking experience of losing her 2-year-old daughter was made worse in an unimaginable way.
The mother from northeastern England recently discovered a fraudulent Facebook page with pictures of herself and her daughter, Zoe, who died in 2008 after undergoing heart surgery, the Daily Mail reports. The site was taking donations for a transplant for Zoe, who was born with a heart valve that was too narrow.
“It would have been hard enough to handle if Zoe had been alive, but she isn’t with us,” Chambers, 37, said. “She’s dead and someone has used her picture to con people out of money.”
The Facebook page, traced back to Jamaica, asked visitors to “share” the link, which would result in a free heart transplant should 1,000 people participate. The page also accepted donations to a personal PayPal account. Though Chambers has contacted police, she doesn’t have a case since money hasn’t been directly stolen from her, the Daily Mail reports.
Unfortunately using the names and identities of children for fraudulent purposes isn’t uncommon, and some thieves go a step further.
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Everything you type on your PC, whether it’s a Web address, your credit card information, user names and passwords – everything – is fair game for key loggers, the hacker-jerks who want to steal your identity and make your life miserable.
Rather than wasting your time reading the rest of this column, hie thee to www.keyscrambler.com and download the free version of KeyScrambler for Windows PCs. If you’re impressed, fork over either $30 or $45 for more powerful versions.
KeyScrambler is simple to use. Once it’s installed, you don’t have to worry about it. As you type in a Web address, user name, password or any other sensitive bit of information, KeyScrambler encrypts it – you can actually watch it generate nonsense character in a little window at the top of your Web browser. I installed it on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and in both cases, it worked just fine.
Those nonsense characters are all a hacker can see, and that won’t do him a bit of good. Your password, for example, comes out as c&b% (or some such combination).
Unlike some commercial programs that protect against the key logging programs they know about, KeyScrambler protects against any key-logging program because it encrypts everything that’s typed into a browser window or other sensitive fill-in-the-blanks
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The majority of data breaches stem from hack attacks, followed by data that’s lost while physically in transit. That’s according to a forthcoming study from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), which assessed all known information relating to the 419 breaches that were publicly disclosed in the United States in 2011. A copy of the report was provided to InformationWeek in advance of its release.
Last year, data breaches triggered by hacking–defined by the ITRC as “a targeted intrusion into a data network,” including card-skimming attacks–were at an all-time high, and responsible for 26% of all known data breach incidents. The next leading cause of breaches was data on the move (18%)–meaning electronic storage devices, laptops, or paper reports that were lost in transit–followed by insider theft (13%).
Overall, malicious attacks–counting not just hack attacks but also insider attacks–accounted for 40% of publicly disclosed breaches, while 20% of breaches were the result of accidental data exposure.
All told, the ITRC counted 22.9 million records as being exposed in 2011, of which 81% included social security numbers. Of all known breaches, 62% involved the exposure of social security numbers and 27% involved credit or debit card data.
Online attacks aren’t the only data breach threat vector. Notably, 16% of known breaches in 2011 involved paper-based breaches, although only 1.4% of the total quantity of breached records were paper-based. Paper-based breach refers to paper reports or printouts that get lost or stolen. But the ITRC said that one challenge with counting such breaches is that they typically don’t get noticed until they’re spotted by outsiders and reported to local media. Furthermore, many states’ data breach notification laws don’t require companies to report paper-based breaches.
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David Ballard, 35, of Philadelphia, was convicted today of eight counts of mail fraud and five counts of aggravated identity theft in connection with an attempted scheme to defraud more than 1,300 individuals. Between January 2010 and April 2011, Ballard obtained names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and other identifying information for more than 1,300 people and, using the stolen information, opened credit cards in their names which he then used to order items over the Internet. The items—for the most part expensive electronic equipment—were then shipped to the individuals whose information was used to purchase them. Ballard would allegedly seek to intercept the shipments before they arrived at their intended destination. The items that Ballard allegedly caused to be delivered were valued at more than $55,000.
Ballard faces a statutory maximum sentence of 170 years’ imprisonment, including a mandatory term of two years’ imprisonment, a three-year term of supervised release, a fine of up to $3.25 million, and a $1,300 special assessment.
The case was investigated by the Philadelphia Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Lauren M. Ouziel.
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Almost 50 million people subscribed to some form of identity-theft protection in 2010. Those services, which cost about $120 to $300 a year, promise to protect your ID by monitoring your credit reports 24/7, scouring “black-market chat rooms” for your personal information, removing your name from marketing lists, and filing fraud alerts. Some throw in up to $1 million in insurance.
More of these pitches are coming from banks, which account for more than half of the $3.5 billion a year spent on ID-theft protection subscriptions. In a sense, consumers who buy this protection from their banks are helping to foot the bill for services that financial institutions are obligated to provide by federal law to shield their customers from losses stemming from credit-card and bank-account fraud.
In the past we’ve found that these protection plans provide questionable value. And some promoters of these services have been slapped by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading sales practices and false claims. We dug into the latest products sold by more than two dozen banks, credit-reporting bureaus, and independent companies. Here’s what we found:
Marketers use fear as a sales tool
The claim. Some ID protectors scare up business with inflated claims about crime. “There were 1.2 million more victims in 2009 than 2008,” Chase warned on its website. “And with a growing 11 million victims each year, one of those identities could be yours.” The facts. That promo, which ran in November 2011, was based on statistics that were out of date. The latest available data show that in 2010 identity fraud fell 27 percent, to 8.1 million victims. As of last fall, Experian Protect MyID was also still claiming that ID theft is “one of the fastest-growing crimes.” More significant, identity fraud is down because financial institutions are doing a better job preventing it. And consumers have become more eagle-eyed about their own accounts, without the need for a paid subscription service.
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St. Kitts and Nevis begins issuing new E (Biometric) passports from January 5th, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Homeland Security, Labour and Social Security has announced.
The Ministry said in a news release that the new passports, with several improved security features, are being introduced as part of government’s ongoing efforts to prevent fraud and identity theft consistent with its regional and international commitments.
The Passport Office will issue the new E – (Biometric) Passports to citizens and residents, who are applying for the documents for the first time, or to those requesting replacements.
Citizens and residents currently using the machine readable passports will continue doing so, once these are not expired, lost and or damaged.
They will not, at this time, be required to change to the new E – (biometric) Passports; until the old document has expired.
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Without a hitch, Ed and Kelley Brill had filed their joint income-tax returns from the same home address for 14 years.
But this year, after obtaining an extension, the Miami Shores, Fla., couple were shocked to learn that the Internal Revenue Service had rejected their electronically filed return. It turned out that a thief had stolen Mrs. Brill’s identity, Social Security number and employer’s name, then filed a falsified refund claim — beating the Brills to the punch.
Now, they still have no idea how they were victimized and must wait six to 12 months to get their $7,918 refund. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, the Brills are enduring a frustrating triple whammy: ID theft, tax fraud and IRS red tape.
“What gets me is, the taxpayer who was ripped off and did nothing wrong has to prove himself to the IRS,” said Mr. Brill, 50.
An IRS representative in November told the Brills that Mrs. Brill’s ID was stolen and used for the fraudulent return but said little else. “The IRS never bothered verifying anything filed by the crook who committed the crime,” said Mr. Brill. “I want to be afforded the same courtesy and efficiency that the crook was afforded by the IRS.”
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