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Stories about: identity theft


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Major New Jersey-Based Identity Theft Ring Dismantled

Fifty-three individuals were charged on Thursday with identity theft and fraud offenses in connection with a sophisticated criminal operation coordinated from Bergen County, New Jersey.Fourty-three were accused in a single criminal complaint of being directly implicated in the organization, dubbed the "Park Criminal ...

17 September 2010
15:26 GMT

Fraudsters Behind London-Based Credit Card Factory Jailed

Two fraudsters who ran a credit card counterfeiting business out of an flat in North London have been sentenced to a total of over five years in prison.Gabriel Yew, 39, and Cheng Chee Weng, 28, were arrested earlier this year following an investigation by the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit (DCPCU) and the We...

17 September 2010
01:20 GMT

Phishers Exploit UK Tax Blunder

Cybercriminals have launched phishing campaigns to try and profit from the news that up to six million people have overpaid or underpaid their taxes for the past two years in UK.It was recently uncovered that taxation blunders have lead to 1.4 million UK taxpayers paying less money in taxes and 4.3 million paying in ...

6 September 2010
02:45 GMT

UK Police Dismantles International Telecom Fraud Ring

Police raided several locations in London and arrested nine people suspected of being members of a criminal ring, which stole millions of pounds from telecommunications companies.It looks like the ring was part of an international fraud network built around fraudulently acquired iPhones, inside which multiple gangs h...

21 August 2010
05:19 GMT

CarderPlanet Founder Arrested in France Awaits Extradition to US

French authorities arrested notorious credit card trafficker Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, one of the CarderPlanet founders last Saturday and plan to extradite him to the United States.Police caught up with Horohorin, 27, in Nice, as he was preparing to embark on a flight bound to Moscow, where he currently resi...

12 August 2010
04:58 GMT

Airline Ticket Fraud Ring Dismantled

Thirty eight suspects have been indicted for their role in a fraud operation that involved selling underpriced airline tickets acquired using stolen identities. The scam affected thousands of individuals and led to losses of over $20 million.“What began as a local law enforcement investigation ultimately expose...

13 July 2010
05:17 GMT

Almost Five Years in Prison for Pharmacy Owner Slash Identity Thief

A pharmacy owner from Maryland was sentenced to 57 months in prison for misusing her customers' personal information and selling mislabeled meds. The identity thief filed fake reimbursement claims for inexistent prescription refills in the name of other patients.According to authorities, Pamela Arrey, 49, owned ...

3 July 2010
07:22 GMT

Former Bank of New York Employee Admits to Identity Theft

A former Bank of New York computer technician has admitted to orchestrating an identity theft scheme, which involved misusing the personal information of 2,000 bank employees. The stolen identities were used to set up dummy accounts for laundering more than $1.1 million over eight years.The Manhattan District Attorne...

3 July 2010
06:19 GMT

FTC Disrupts International Micro-Payment Fraud Operation

The Federal Trade Commission has halted the operations of an international identity theft ring that managed to fly under the radar for years. The scheme involved charging the credit cards of over a million consumers with amounts less than $10 and using dummy companies to route the payments.The fraudsters used stolen ...

29 June 2010
06:54 GMT

TJX Hacker Receives Record Prison Sentence

Albert Gonzales, the most prolific credit card thief in history, was sentenced to twenty years in a federal prison yesterday. The sentence is only for the 2005 attacks against TJX, Office Max, Barnes & Noble, Dave & Busters and a few other retailers; however, the hacker is also awaiting sentencing in a different case...

26 March 2010
10:28 GMT

Mastermind Behind the RBS WorldPay Hit Arrested in Russia

Viktor Pleshchuk, one of the hackers indicted last year in the RBS WorldPay cyberheist case, was arrested by authorities in Russia. The Financial Times reports that he was apprehended along with several other suspects by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).RBS WorldPay is a large payment proc...

23 March 2010
11:27 GMT

Romanian National Pleads Guilty to Phishing-Related Charges

Cornel Ionut Tonita, 28, of Galati, Romania, pleaded guilty to charges in connection with a phishing scheme that targeted the customers of numerous financial institutions, the U.S. Department of Justice announces. The phisher is scheduled for sentencing on April 5 and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison....

15 January 2010
11:12 GMT

Talented Programmer Gets Two-Year Prison Sentence in TJX Case

Stephen Watt, a 25-year-old software developer, was sentenced to two years in a federal prison for the role he played in the TJX hit, one of the largest credit card thefts in history. The programmer was also ordered to pay the company $171.5 million in restitution for the harm caused.The man befriended notorious hack...

28 December 2009
10:05 GMT

Romanian National Pleads Guilty to ATM Skimming

Victor Vasile Constantin, 23, of Romania, has pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud and one of identity theft in Connecticut U.S. District Court. The fraudster installed special devices on automated teller machines (ATMs) in order to capture credit card data.Mr. Constantin was arrested by the Norwalk Police back ...

18 November 2009
08:35 GMT

One Hundred Phishing Gang Indicted

The FBI announced that 33 individuals were arrested in connection with an international phishing gang that operated out of U.S. and Egypt. The indictment recently unsealed in a Los Angeles federal court charges a total of 53 people, while the Egyptian authorities have identified an additional 47 suspects.The indictme...

8 October 2009
04:53 GMT

Two Alleged Romanian Phishers Extradited to US

Two Romanian nationals indicted in January 2007 on charges of conspiracy to commit access device and bank fraud, as well as aggravated identity theft were extradited to the US to stand trial. Both of them face maximum prison sentences of 37 years and $1.5 million fines, but have pleaded not guilty.Petru Bogdan Belbit...

30 September 2009
06:07 GMT

Five New Suspects Indicted in Two-Year-Old Identity Theft Case

The New York County District Attorney's Office announced that five Eastern Europeans were indicted for dealing in stolen credit cards and other crimes that resulted in $4 million being lost to fraud. International authorities arrested three of them in 2008 and were recently extradited to US.Viatcheslav Vasilyev,...

3 September 2009
09:52 GMT

AT&T and T-Mobile Identity Theft Gang Indicted

Eight individuals have been indicted in the Brooklyn federal court for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud. The prosecutors claim that they illegally obtained wireless equipment amounting to $22 million by using stolen AT&T and T-Mobile customer information.The complex scheme began in February 2005 and las...

24 August 2009
04:37 GMT

LimeWire P2P Crook Gets Three Years in Jail

The man that illicitly used the LimeWire P2P client to hack into personal computers and steal financial or personal information was convicted to three years behind bars in the state of Washington, USA. Frederick Eugene Wood, a Seattle native, used his LimeWire client to acquire enough data so he could impersonate up ...

13 August 2009
10:48 GMT

TV Lamps Online Merchant Suffers Data Breach

DLP Lamp Source, a distributor of replacement DLP and LCD lamps, is in the process of notifying its customers of a data-breach incident, which exposed their personal information and credit-card details. The company notes that the administration portion of its website was compromised by unknown attackers. We have bec...

31 July 2009
04:47 GMT

Security Expert Analyzes the Botnet-Based Economy

Yury Namestnikov, antivirus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, explains why botnets are so common and how they are used to generate illegal income. Their fairly low maintenance costs and ease of use, combined with the high profits they can bring, make them the perfect cybercriminal tool. Botnets are armies of computers infec...

27 July 2009
09:24 GMT

Identity Theft Kingpin Pleads Guilty

A Waldorf, Maryland man pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud after being accused of leading a complex, identity-theft operation that involved pickpocketing, bribes and fake checks. The authorities claim the scheme resulted in over $2.1 million being lost to fraud. Clyde Austin Gray, Jr., 52, also known ...

27 July 2009
04:30 GMT

Bank of America Phishing Campaign in Circulation

Spam analysts from AV vendor BitDefender warn of a new phishing campaign targeting Bank of America costumers. The spam e-mails bear the branding elements of the company and instruct potential victims to visit a link and complete a fake customer form with their credit card information. The phishing e-mails' "Fro...

14 July 2009
08:52 GMT

Social Security Numbers Can Be Predicted Using Public Information

Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University have studied the predictability of Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and have discovered that they can be determined fairly easily from publicly available data. The researchers urge companies in the private sector to stop using SSNs for identity verification, something the...

7 July 2009
09:14 GMT

Tax Refund Scam Targets British Taxpayers

Phishers have launched an e-mail campaign that attempts to trick UK taxpayers into handing out their financial and personal details. The emails are spoofed to appear as being sent by the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and display legit contact details to increase their credibility. "After the annual calculation of your...

6 July 2009
06:56 GMT

Facebook Basic Profile Information Hack Revealed

FBHive, a new blog that promises to deliver up-to-date news and information about all things Facebook, dropped a social networking bomb yesterday, by announcing a simple hack that allowed virtually anyone to view a Facebook user's basic profile information. The disclosure finally sent the network's security...

23 June 2009
04:48 GMT

Online Merchant's Server Hacking Results in Data Breach

Batteries.com, a supplier of batteries and accessories for electronic consumer products, has announced a data breach incident after unknown individuals obtained unauthorized access to the server used to host its online store. Customer names, addresses and credit card details were stolen and some of the information ha...

3 June 2009
08:12 GMT

Flurry of Phishing Attacks Targeting Commonwealth Bank

Security researchers from antivirus vendor Sophos have reported three different phishing campaigns targeting the customers of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in only one week. The attacks employ different social engineering tricks to convince people to reveal their banking and personal details. The first phishing...

2 June 2009
08:08 GMT

Major Manhattan Identity Theft Gang Busted

The New York County District Attorney's Office announced that an identity theft gang had been indicted for operating a check scam that targeted numerous commercial banks in Manhattan. The operation relied on bank insiders to provide full customer information for counterfeiting checks. "The investigation leading...

1 June 2009
03:52 GMT

Romanian Immigrant Gets Eight-and-a-Half-Year Prison Sentence

A Minneapolis federal judge has sentenced Sergiu Daniel Popa, 23, from Shelby Township, Michigan, to eight and a half years in jail for running a phishing scheme, which lasted almost seven years and totaled $700,000 in losses.Popa emigrated to U.S. from Romania and started his illegal online activities in June 2000, ...

29 May 2009
09:03 GMT

LifeLock Banned from Placing Fraud Alerts

A California judge has banned LifeLock, a company offering identity theft protection services, from placing fraud alerts on its customers' credit profiles. The ruling comes after Experian, one of the three credit reporting bureaus in the U.S., has sued LifeLock, claiming that this practice was violating the Fair...

28 May 2009
06:49 GMT

IRS Does Not Properly Dispose of Taxpayer Records

Workers from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) went trash-hunting at IRS offices from several cities in order to perform an audit of the agency's waste-disposal processes. They conclude in their report (PDF) that the Internal Revenue Service fails to properly protect taxpayer informat...

27 May 2009
04:33 GMT

Germany Is a Significant Source of Malicious URLs

Security researchers from German antivirus vendor Avira have recently analyzed the origin of the URLs used in worldwide phishing and malware distribution campaigns. The results revealed that around 15% of malicious URLs were hosted in Germany. German citizens are, obviously, one of the preferred targets of identity ...

26 May 2009
06:56 GMT

Over a Third of Employees Willing to Sell Company Data

A survey commissioned by Infosecurity Europe has revealed that 37 percent of the questioned employees would consider handing over business records to third-parties for the right incentive. This comes to strengthen the claim that insider threats are on the rise, which has also been amongst the conclusions outlined in ...

30 April 2009
04:27 GMT

Companies Fear Employees Disclose Too Much Info Online

A recent survey on how companies deal with social networking, performed by IT security vendor Sophos, has concluded that over 60 percent of them worry that personal info shared on such services by their employees could put their infrastructure at risk. However, productivity concerns remain the main reason for control...

29 April 2009
04:25 GMT

U.S. Pharmacy Hackers Arrested in Romania

Five suspects have been detained by the Romanian authorities for hacking into the networks of several U.S. pharmaceutical companies and intercepting credit card transaction data. The total damages amount to 800,000 USD. Police officers from the Directorate for Fighting Electronic Crime have collaborated with prosecu...

14 April 2009
04:24 GMT

New UK e-Crime Police Scores First Hit

UK's new division of cybercops, the Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU), has marked its first successful operation by arresting a gang of nine London-based Eastern Europeans, who compromised computers at various financial institutions and siphoned money from their customers' accounts. On Wednesday, the poli...

10 April 2009
04:20 GMT

Former Teen Hacker Charged with New Cybercrimes

Van T. Dinh, from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was arrested and charged with two counts of computer fraud after he hacked into an administrative account of a currency-exchange service and transferred money into another one, set up with the same company. The hacker had previously spent 13 months in prison for a stock-m...

1 April 2009
08:22 GMT

Malware Distributors Trick Users with Fake Identity-Theft Alerts

Security researchers from Sophos warn of a new malware-distribution scheme that involves fake notifications sent via SMS. The messages inform users that their banking details have been exposed and are available on a website that actually serves exploits. According to the Sophos alert, the incident was reported to th...

30 March 2009
05:16 GMT

One AOL Phisher Sent to Jail, While Another Gets Probation

Two men have received significantly different sentences for their involvement in a four-year-long phishing operation that targeted AOL customers. Charlie Blount Jr. will spend the next four years behind bars, while Thomas Taylor Jr. will pass the same time on probation. Between 2000 and 2006, a gang of cybercrooks p...

27 March 2009
07:19 GMT

Thousands of Credit Card Details Cached in Google

An Australian working in the IT industry has stumbled upon a cached website containing the complete details of around 22,000 credit cards. Most of them belong to US and UK citizens and are issued by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo, Switch, Delta and Maestro/Cirrus. According to ITnews Australia, the man has...

24 March 2009
07:34 GMT

Botnet Runner Sentenced to Four Years Behind Bars

John Kenneth Schiefer, 27, from Los Angeles, has been sentenced by a federal court to four years in prison and the payment of $22,500 in damages and fines for infecting some one quarter million computers with information-stealing malware. The hacker has been working for the past several months as a technician for Mah...

6 March 2009
06:23 GMT

ATM Flashmob Robs $9 Million

The largest flashmob heist ever recorded took place on November 8th, when dozens of so-called cashers from all around the globe took to their local ATMs and withdrew over $9 million from payroll cards owned by a company called RBS WorldPay, whose computer system was cracked by a very skilled hacker. The crime was orc...

7 February 2009
06:45 GMT

Safe Online Navigation Is Part of the Digital Life

On January 28, Microsoft joined governmental organizations and companies in the private sector to raise awareness of privacy and data protection issues. In 2007, the Council of Europe and the European Commission selected January 28 as the Data Privacy Day, and the Redmond company was quick to jump aboard, an indicati...

28 January 2009
15:01 GMT

Phishing Attack Targets the Canada Revenue Agency

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) makes the subject of a recent phishing campaign, the security researchers from IT security vendor Websense warn. This attack tries to capitalize on the upcoming deadline for submitting tax return applications online. The Canada Revenue Agency is the Canadian version of the U.S. IRS, an...

22 January 2009
04:58 GMT

U.S. Payment Processor Suffers Major Security Breach

Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processing provider based in Princeton, N.J., has disclosed that the security of its network has been compromised by unknown attackers. During a recent audit malicious applications intercepting and stealing transaction data have been found installed on the company's systems. ...

21 January 2009
03:53 GMT

T.J. Maxx Hacker Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison

The Ukrainian hacker that participated in what many consider to be the biggest identity theft scam of all times has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, in Turkey. Despite causing losses of millions of dollars worldwide, he went to trial and was arrested for hacking several Turkish banks. Maksym Yastremskiy, aka &ld...

9 January 2009
04:31 GMT

Hammer Your Data Away - Or Not

Security researchers and computer experts were baffled to hear that a respectful UK-based computer magazine was advising its readers to smash their old hard drives with a hammer under the pretext of protecting sensitive data. The magazine is careful enough to mention taking the HDDs out of the computer first, but fai...

8 January 2009
11:01 GMT

RBS WorldPay Data Leak Affects 1.5 Million Cardholders

RBS WorldPay, a popular payment processing service, has announced that an unknown and unauthorized party has illegally obtained access to its computer systems. The personal information of 1.5 million customers, as well as the Social Security numbers of 1.1 million, may have been compromised, according to the company....

28 December 2008
06:34 GMT

Social Engineering Outsourced

Cyber-crooks don't need to worry about the language barrier anymore while scheming to defraud individuals or financial institutions. A new underground service offers social engineering services to scammers in multiple languages, Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant, warns. As the security reasearch...

16 December 2008
09:55 GMT


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