WP: ChoicePoint Data Cache Became a Powder Keg [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8587-2005Mar4.html

The man on the phone called himself James Garrett.

Speaking with a lilting accent, the man said he was an executive with a Los Angeles company called M.B.S Financial. He told an employee at ChoicePoint Inc. that he wanted to open an online account with the company to receive electronic reports on people.

It was the kind of request that ChoicePoint, one of the nation's largest information services, gets all the time. Thousands of corporate and government clients rely on the company to provide them with publicly available information on people for help in hiring, fraud detection, journalist research, national security and debt collection.

But the man's call last fall was different, according to a detective's description of the encounter and testimony presented in a later court hearing. Unknown to ChoicePoint, the caller was not Garrett, an actor in the Los Angeles area. Police said he was a con artist involved in a vast identity-theft scam that succeeded in making off with records of at least 145,000 people. The real Garrett was just another victim.

The imposter's attempt to gain access to even more files would not only expose the scam, but spark a national outrage and congressional hearings over whether the nation's growing commercial data industry is doing enough to guard personal information.