The man who pled guilty to stealing personal information from consumer data collector ChoicePoint was sentenced to 10 years in California state prison Friday for defrauding the Alpharetta GA-based aggregator and seller of consumer data, as well as banks and consumers around the nation.
Oluwatunji Oluwatosin was also ordered to pay $2 million in restitution to ChoicePoint and about $6 million to the banks that suffered credit-card losses in the theft.
Oluwatosin was serving a 16-month prison sentence for another identity theft conviction when he was indicted in the ChoicePoint case last August. In October, he pleaded guilty to stealing more than $2.5 million through the scam.
With time already served, he could be released in about four years and might then face deportation back to his native Nigeria, his lawyer reported. There is little likelihood that the fines imposed in the verdict will be collected.
For at least two years beginning in 2002, Oluwatosin used cellphones, fake addresses and anonymous mail drops to create fraudulent collection businesses of which he was the owner. In that capacity, he and others in his employment tricked ChoicePoint and reportedly gained access to the addresses, real estate records, bank information and other details it had collected on more than 1,500 consumers, using that data to access existing credit accounts or open new ones with stolen names.
The fraud was finally made public about a year ago, when ChoicePoint revealed that identity thieves had gained illegal access to its data records and breached the information security of as many as 145,000 consumers. A California consumer-protection law required the disclosure.
Last month ChoicePoint agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle charges that the theft of personal and credit-card data resulted from unfair or deceptive practices by the company. While not admitting any wrong-doing in the security breach, ChoicePoint also agreed to set up a $5 million fund to reimburse consumers injured by the theft.
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