Jay Weaver provides an update with additional details on a breach involving Rodney St. Fleur, an employee of a Miami law firm who misused his access to LexisNexis database searches to steal over 20,000 individuals’ information for a tax refund fraud scheme. Weaver reports that in court, St. Fleur admitted that he had stolen the Social Security numbers of prison inmates and sold the information to one-time North Miami gang member Frantz Pierre, who reportedly used the information to file millions of dollars in tax refund claims. St. Fleur received the stiffest sentence ever handed out in Florida for a case of this kind and:
Pierre and other members of his ring, accused of providing lists of names and birth dates to St. Fleur, were charged separately last year in connection with the conspiracy.
Berger told the judge that Internal Revenue Service agents found a list of 3,000 names and birth dates, along with their Social Security numbers provided by St. Fleur, in the former gang leader’s home in Broward County.
St. Fleur was also held liable for more than $11 million in tax-refund fraud — although Berger said in theory the actual figure could be greater than $100 million because of the sheer volume of fraudulent returns possibly submitted under the stolen identities of prisoners and others.
St. Fleur, who apologized to the judge for his wrongdoing, must surrender May 6 to begin his prison sentence. He had pleaded guilty to his crime in November, but did not cooperate with authorities.
Read more on The Miami Herald.
Although the law firm St. Fleur worked for was not named in documents or court, DataBreaches.net subsequently learned that it was Sprechman & Associates, whose delayed breach notification letter I commented on previously when I didn’t know that their letter was connected to this case.
From available court filings and other sources, it appears that the law firm was first contacted on or about November 2011 by LexisNexis who informed them that they were cutting off St. Fleur’s account/access to their database for exceeding authorized access. Why Sprechman & Associates did not terminate St. Fleur at that time is unknown as the firm did not respond to several emails asking them to discuss the case and allegations. St. Fleur was not terminated until July 2012 – after law enforcement executed a search warrant at his home and then examined his office computer, where they found evidence of his criminal conduct.
It’s a shame that neither LexisNexis nor Sprechman & Associates were willing to discuss this breach, as more transparency might help others avoid similar insider breaches. But in light of what we now know – that this breach resulted in fraudulent tax refunds and ID theft, the law firm’s notification letter to those potentially affected seems strikes me as even more inadequate. I do not know if they ever sent out any follow-up notification letters.
N.B. Some of the court filings in this case have been uploaded to DataLossDB.org, here (free registration to that site is required to access).