Security News > 2021 > May > 'Dearthy Star' pleads guilty to selling info of 65K health care employees
Justin Sean Johnson, a 30-year-old from Detroit, Michigan, has pleaded guilty to stealing the personally identifiable information of 65,000 employees of health care provider and insurer University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and selling it on the dark web.
UPMC is Pennsylvania's largest health care provider that employs more than 90,000 employees in 40 hospitals and 700 doctors' offices and outpatient sites.
"Justin Johnson stands accused of stealing the names, Social Security numbers, addresses and salary information of every employee of Pennsylvania's largest health care system," U.S. Attorney Brady said in a press release issued in June 2020, after his arrest.
Johnson deposited the cryptocurrency he bought using the monies obtained by selling the stolen UPMC employees' data into a Coinbase account.
Besides selling the PII of roughly 65,000 employees from UPMC's breached HR databases, Johnson also stole and sold almost 90,000 additional sets of PII between 2014 and 2017, all of it potentially used by the buyers to commit identity theft and bank fraud.
Johnson remains detained pending sentencing, as the Court ordered after his guilty plea was filed last week.