US Passport Agency Contractor Stole Applicants' Data To Steal Their Identities

An anonymous reader writes: According to federal prosecutors three women are responsible for an identity theft and wire fraud scheme targeting both the Houston and Atlanta passport agencies. Chloe McClendon, Alicia Myles, and Dominique Thomas are accused of stealing personal information from the passport administration and transmitting it back and forth between one another. The stolen information was used to obtain lines of credit in order to purchase iPhones, iPads and other electronics. The scheme went on for over five years.

Comments

A private contractor

[humptheElephant]

Here's the case of a for profit contractor, probably charging a 300% overhead, not checking out their employees well enough. But hell, why not, more profits, more pay for the CEO. The government can pay it, its rich. Someone knows someone to get these folks a good paying contract.

Re:A private contractor

[meglon]

Grow a brain then try using it. The root cause is greed, enabled by the privatization of what should be a government function. Your stupid asshatery hatred of the government IS part the problem. This shouldn't be tagged "government" it should be tagged "private contractors," but sadly there's too many idiots who want to say government is bad all the time without seeing that many issues with government stem from the private sector committing various frauds and thefts from said government.

For the record, i don't have a passport... and i'm not such a fucking idiot that i think the government is going to come shoot me because i don't. I swear, peoples IQ must have dropped by 50 points in the last 30-40 years or so. There's just that many more fucking idiots than i remember while growing up.

Why, why, why.

[sotweed]

What possible reason is there for the passport office to need to expose this information outside the agency?

How can it possibly be worth the risk, even if there is some minor function which they outsourced to the
fraudsters.

The gummint ought to be forced to do an analysis of the risk and value before the outsource a function
which provides this kind of access to the data of citizens. Private companies might do well also to do it.

Re:Why, why, why.

[Ryanrule]

this was a PRIVATE contractor. it was being used because BIG GOVT BAD BIDNESS GOOD MAKE MORE BIDNESS.

IRS e-file risk

[Skapare]

this is the concept of why i do not use e-file for my annual tax filing. the e-file scheme give some filing company a lot of personal info. i trust the IRS more than any of those businesses. i used one once (a major name) and got marketing mail from them for 5 years.

Re:Unnecessary

[Jason Levine]

As someone who had his Identity stolen/used, I can attest that the person is a victim also. I was lucky, relatively speaking. The thieves opened a credit card in my name, using my name, address, DOB, and SSN. (Interestingly, they got Mother's Maiden Name wrong, but that didn't raise any red flags.) They paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address. (Second red flag missed: Immediately changing the address to a different state right after opening the card.) Due to a quirk in processing, the card got sent to me. Had it been sent to them, they would have charged up a storm and the collections agency would have banged down my door for me to pay the $5,000+ debt.

Identity theft victims - the people, not the companies - can find their credit rating shredded. They can spend years trying to repair the damage that an Identity thief ruins in a weekend of binge buying. And this doesn't even get into Criminal Identity Theft where an arrested criminal gives your name, SSN, DOB, etc to the police so that you wind up with a criminal record without ever having committed any crimes. And good luck getting all of the police systems corrected. They all feed into one another so fixing one means the bad data will just flow back into it.

Like I said, I was lucky. I still need to spend the rest of my life with my credit file frozen - my information is out there and could be used to open new accounts at any point if I left it unfrozen. It means that any time I need my credit file used (new car loan, credit check, opening a new credit card, etc), I need to pay to thaw my accounts for a limited period of time and hope that the transactions complete in that time frame.