A California
couple has been indicted over allegations they used their military
status to steal the personal information of more than 9,000 people.
According to a report
from NBC Los Angeles on Wednesday, Natasha Chalk and her husband
Marquis Hooper used their positions in the U.S. Navy to access, then
sell, the compromised identities for a total of around $160,000 in bitcoin (BTC, +6.05%).
Prosecutors allege the couple intended for the stolen personal information to be used in crime related to identity theft.
Hooper,
who was stationed in Japan at the time, was a chief petty officer with
the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, while Chalk was a naval reservist stationed at
Naval Air Station Lemoore in California.
Last week, the couple were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
In
August 2018, Hooper got in touch with a company storing millions of
people’s personal information and claimed to be conducting background
checks on behalf of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet.
However,
it is alleged Hooper gave his wife and others, who were not named,
access to the database account. Over the course of two and half months,
the couple ran searches on thousands of people.
The
illegally obtained personal data ultimately ended up being used in
identity theft by the recipients, according to the indictments.
The
couple’s lawyer, Michael McKneely, argued the pair utilized
“commercially available databases” used by everyday people and also
added the action by the couple was “clearly part of the scope of their
work.”
Prosecutors
cite the case of an Arizona man who tried to withdraw money from a bank
account using a fake driver’s license that Hooper had allegedly found
in the database.
Chalk
was detained on Monday, while Hooper was arrested on Tuesday. The pair
face a maximum of 20 years in prison, according to the report.
source link : https://www.coindesk.com/us-navy-identity-theft-bitcoin
