Lance Ealy, an Ohio man who fled home confinement last year just prior to his conviction on charges of filing phony tax refund requests on more than 150 Americans, was apprehended in a pre-dawn raid by federal marshals in Atlanta on Wednesday. Lance Ealy, in self-portrait he uploaded to twitter before absconding. Ealy, 28, of Dayton, Ohio, was the subject of no fewer than three previous posts on this blog .
Premera Blue Cross Breach Exposes Financial, Medical Records
Premera Blue Cross , a major provider of health care services, disclosed today that an intrusion into its network may have resulted in the breach of financial and medical records of 11 million customers. Although Premera isn’t saying so just yet, there are independent indicators that this intrusion is once again the work of state-sponsored espionage groups based in China. In a statement posted on a Web site set up to share information about the breach — premeraupdate.com — the company said that it learned about the attack on January 29, 2015
The Rise in State Tax Refund Fraud
Intuit: Anti-fraud Improvements by IRS Fuel Up To 3700 Percent Rise in Phony State Filings Scam artists stole billions of dollars last year from the U.S. Treasury by filing phony federal tax refund requests on millions of Americans.
Toward a Breach Canary for Data Brokers
When a retailer’s credit card systems get breached by hackers, banks usually can tell which merchant got hacked soon after those card accounts become available for purchase at underground cybercrime shops. But when companies that collect and sell sensitive consumer data get hacked or are tricked into giving that information to identity thieves, there is no easy way to tell who leaked the data when it ends up for sale in the black market. In this post, we’ll examine one idea to hold consumer data brokers more accountable.
ID Theft Service Customer Gets 27 Months
A Florida man was sentenced today to 27 months in prison for trying to purchase Social Security numbers and other data from an identity theft service that pulled consumer records from a subsidiary of credit bureau Experian . Ngo’s ID theft service superget.info Derric Theoc , 36, pleaded guilty to attempting to purchase Social Security and bank account records on more than 100 Americans with the intent to open credit card accounts and file fraudulent tax returns in the victims’ names.