Man Sentenced in Theft of Patient's Identity
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A technician at a cancer center was sentenced to 16 months in prison for stealing the identity of a gravely ill patient, who spent months trying to clear his name while the disease ravaged his body.
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VICTORVILLE, Calif. - A woman facing theft charges tried to get out of jail using a phony hospital letter claiming she needed a lifesaving pacemaker, authorities said.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - A Seattle man faces as many as 29 years in prison after being charged with using the LimeWire and Soulseek p-to-p (peer-to-peer) networks to commit identity theft. Gregory Kopiloff was arrested Thursday on charges of mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization, and two counts of aggravated identity theft, said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington. This is the first case that Langlie's office is aware of that involves p-to-p identity-theft charges, she said. In court filings, federal prosecutors alleged that Kopiloff began the scam around March 2005, using the p-to-p networks to search for victims who had accidentally configured their software to share sensitive documents. Hard drives were searched for "federal income tax returns, student financial aid applications, and credit reports that had been stored electronically," court filings state. Using that information, Kopiloff would fill out online credit card applications, then buy products such as iPods or computer hard drives, which he then resold for cash, typically at about 50 cents on the dollar, federal prosecutors claim. Kopiloff was allegedly able to buy more than $73,000 worth of merchandise using online credit card accounts he'd set up using the identities of at least 83 victims. It's easy for unsophisticated users to accidentally share sensitive information via p-to-p networks, said Christopher Boyd, director of malware research with FaceTime Communications. "Some P2P programs have 'share folder' options and if you accidentally hit it, bam -- it's out there without you even knowing about it," he said in an instant-message interview. But luckily there's an easy fix for the problem. Boyd recommends that p-to-p users place all of their sensitive documents on a stand-alone drive, separate from the main PC. "It's about the best way to ensure you don't accidentally share your life story with the rest of the world via P2P," he said.
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A Hertfordshire doctor who  admitted forging blood test results has been sentenced to nine months in jail.
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QUINCY, Mass. - John Russo has been a victim of identity theft. So when he was asked to fork over a photo ID just to be seated at an IHOP pancake restaurant, he flipped.
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MADRID, Spain - A Spaniard was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison for stealing the equivalent of a dollar from a pay phone 13 years ago.
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A Seattle man has been arrested in what the Justice Department described as its first case against someone accused of using file-sharing digital data to commit identity theft.
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A body part allegedly stolen in the US has been implanted in a patient in the UK, a hospital confirms.
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A Michigan man has been sentenced to five years in prison for stealing personal data on more than 100,000 people while working for Sentry Insurance Co. and for trying to sell it.
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NOVATO, Calif. - A man was convicted of various theft charges, after prosecutors say he stole computers from the courthouse while he was on trial for computer theft.
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A former network engineer and technical services manager at a San Diego nonprofit was convicted of hacking into his former employer's computer system and sabotaging patient data.
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama  - A Federal judge on Tuesday   sentenced former HealthSouth Corp.HLSH.OB Chief Financial   Officer Michael Martin to 36 months in prison, marking the   third time he has been sentenced for his part in a $2.7 billion   accounting scandal that rocked the company.
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CROWN POINT, Ind. - Officials are at a loss to explain how they allowed a homeless, mentally ill man accused of stealing a soda to languish in jail for 17 months.
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A doctor who rushed patients into sex change surgery is found guilty of serious professional misconduct.
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SCRANTON, Pa. - Schuylkill County Prison officials took an inmate's prosthetic leg when they found tobacco hidden in it, tossed it around until they broke it and refused to return it, the former inmate said in a federal lawsuit against the county, the prison and officials.
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NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- A Norwalk doctor charged in a vaccine fraud case has been fined $30,000 and has been placed on probation for two years.