Twenty-Five Year Old Vietnamese Succeeds in Stealing 200 Million American Identities
And once again, another hacker genius has appeared from a remote area of the Internet to show that the computer system of the United States of America is in critical need of re-evaluation and improvement.
The Department of Justice has released a report that a Vietnamese male, by the name of Hieu Minh Ngo, was sentenced to prison for 13 years after breaking into the computer systems of American companies, accessing personal information of almost 200 million individuals and putting it up for sale to criminals online. With this modus, Ngo at 25 years old, was able to earn over $2 million.
According to Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, the business of buying and selling stolen identity data is very popular because criminals deem it to be a proposition of low risk but comes with high rewards.
From the years 2007 to 2013, Ngo focused work on penetrating computers systems from his residence in Vietnam. As soon as he was able to gain access, he would gather as much data as he possibly could from the systems of companies ranging from complete names, birthdays, addresses, contact or mobile numbers, social security numbers as well as bank and credit card information.
Once he has completed all necessary data, termed as “fullz”, he would have this advertised on the websites that he himself operated namely findget.me and superget.info (currently shut down). Ngo likewise confessed that in the cyberworld, criminals could search all mentioned websites to obtain stolen data about a particular person. Report says more than 1,300 of Ngo’s customers from all over the globe have referred to his websites, garnering a total of 3 million searches.
Such information obtained from his websites would be employed for filing fraud income tax returns. As per the Internal Revenue Service, information about 13,673 Americans were used to file over $65 million in returns.
NBC News reports that Ngo was arrested last February 2013 during his visit to the USA and was sentenced by the the New Hampshire district for wire, identity and access-device fraud.
