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40 Million Identities Up For Sale On the Web
An anonymous reader writes "Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world. The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public. Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."
If you're in the UK then as long as the data isn't held securely by him then yes. The UK's data protection act requires that all information that can be used to personally identify an individual is held securely.
If you're in the UK you can also use the Freedom of Information act to request any information he's holding about you, but for that he can charge a nominal fee, which is how he's probably planning on making the money invested back.
A former member of the metropolitan police and corrupt? Don't colour me surprised.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
No, we did. We being British tax payers, of which I am one, who are currently funding his pension. We're also funding the British police too, mentioned in the article as one of his sources. It follows then that we funded his career in the Met as well.
And now the git wants us to pay for stolen information, obtained from publicly funded sources utilising his publicly funded connections to acquire. Whatever his previous achievements in the Met may or may not have been, now he is simply a slimy scammer trading in stolen goods. The man is a disgrace.
Cheers,
Ian
Extortion is threatening to use the information against you or leaking it even more if you do not pay. The company is not doing this. The company is saying this is what I have come across during my travels... If you want to know what I know about you then pay up, you are not obligated to do so. Kind of like those for pay credit score reports. (I know you don't have to pay for the credit report.. but the credit score is a different matter.)
I am in no way defending the practice.
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If this was a "post-retirement" project he's been working on, then it would be legal.
No it wouldn't. This guy has no legal basis to acquire or retain this data, he's in very serious breach of the UK Data Protection Act.
Lets be fair, he's in possession of stolen property, and although he has turned himself into the authorities, the law applies to all criminals, no matter how they draw a pension. Perhaps the blokes that raid private events based on facebook tags should try the swat team or bomb squad and put a stop to extortion and misuse of public authority. Its looking like a gang related organized crime syndicate, or perhaps its all a coincidence or just an invitation for the blue hats to hack his target rich database. Good thing he's armed with a mace and a night stick. That way he can defend the 40 million people who he feels each owe him .000567 in order to recoup expenses for obtaining stolen ID's.
Like ... actually having the information in the first place without permission of the owners of the data. The only legal thing he can do with it is destroy it.
I certainly have not authorized him to use my information.
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The pro-piracy folks around here say that copying isn't theft. I'd say that'd apply here too.
Not just the pro-piracy folks. Although I'd like to see reform, I am in favour of copyright. Incorrectly defining terms makes sensible discussion of a topic difficult or even impossible.
This topic doesn't inflame the argument so much because there is not a substantial portion of people who want "identity theft" to be legal. Since there is no debate on whether it should be allowed or not, using an incorrect term doesn't highjack the argument into being propaganda for one side. Theft and stealing are terms commonly used to describe things that are not in fact theft. That's usually ok, but when discussing proposed changes to laws that affect the whose society it isn't. For example, I would regard MPAA equating copying a movie with stealing a car, repetitively making that connection in the absence of opposing argument to the general population (on DVDs) as tainting the jury pool.
A teenage girl might accuse another of "stealing" her boyfriend. No problem, until you start proposing laws to have boyfriend thieves charged with theft. At that point, it would be necessary to point out the differences and that "stealing" is not really an appropriate term for what happened. That's where we are with copyright right now. In identity theft cases, I'm not sure there is a word to properly describe it yet. It is usually done in order to commit fraud, but the harvesting of the identity info is only the first step and probably isn't fraud in and of itself. Although fraud and theft are different, common usage of theft includes fraud, so theft is perhaps the best word to use right now even though it isn't exactly correct.
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More than a little fishy. I read this as, "British fraud officer leaves the force, collects the personal information of 40 million people from the black market and his buddies in law enforcement, and is now using it to make money. Oh, but it's not unethical this time because he used to be a policeman." If it was illegal for the phishers and fraudsters to have this ill-gained information, why is it not illegal for a former police officer to have it?
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain, but here in the U.S., I would hope that there's a law providing for the destruction of personal and/or financial details that were obtained illegally once they are no longer considered evidence in an ongoing prosecution.