Security News > 2020 > August > Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part I

For several years beginning around 2010, a lone teenager in Vietnam named Hieu Minh Ngo ran one of the Internet's most profitable and popular services for selling "Fullz," stolen identity records that included a consumer's name, date of birth, Social Security number and email and physical address.

O'Neill said he opened the investigation into Ngo's identity theft business after reading about it in a 2011 KrebsOnSecurity story, "How Much is Your Identity Worth?" According to O'Neill, what's remarkable about Ngo is that to this day his name is virtually unknown among the pantheon of infamous convicted cybercriminals, the majority of whom were busted for trafficking in huge quantities of stolen credit cards.

O'Neill said Ngo's identity theft website generated tens of thousands of queries each month.

The U.K.-based collaborator told Ngo he had personally shut down Ngo's access to Experian because he had been there first and Ngo was interfering with his business.

For a short time, Ngo used his access to TLO to power a new iteration of his business - an identity theft service rebranded as usearching[.

News URL

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/confessions-of-an-id-theft-kingpin-part-i/