LifeLock

Think of all the steps you take to protect your children. You protect their health by adhering to a schedule for vaccinations. You monitor their Internet usage to protect them from predators. You use parental controls to keep them from watching excessively violent or sexual shows on TV.

You’d like to thing that schools are also doing all they can to protect your children from identity thieves. But the truth is your children’s personally identifying information is a cash cow for school districts and colleges, and many cash-strapped education institutions are taking advantage of it.

The same federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 that gave schools broad authority to decide what student information belongs in the public record and can be used in school publications such as student directories and yearbooks, also gives them authority to sell lists containing students’ names, ages, phone numbers, and email and home addresses. (more…)

Private investigators Emilio and Brandy Torrella were sentenced in Tacoma’s U.S. District Court last week for providing their customers with the kind of information nobody else could.

BNT Investigations, the Torrellas’ Belfair, Washington company illegally obtained confidential medical records, tax records and employment information by “pretexting”, that is, they posed as the subjects of their investigations who had legitimate claim to the records.

The Torrellas admitted to contacting and defrauding government agencies, financial institutions, pharmacies and hospitals. Depending on the type of personal information they were trying to obtain, they posed as mentally retarded adults, doctors’ office employees or someone facing foreclosure or suffering with serious illness.

Emilio and Brandy Torrella are two among 10 private investigators hired by divorce attorneys, insurance companies and collection agencies and indicted by a federal grand jury in 2007. According to the indictment, the other co-conspirators fed the Torellas personally identifying information on the subjects they’d been hired to investigate. The Torellas then made the phone calls.

The other defendants named in the grand jury indictment are:
Steven W. Berwick, a BNT employee of Belfair, Washington
Victoria J. Tade, San Diego
Megan Ososke, Beaverton, Oregon
Darci P. Templeton, Houston
Esaun G. Pinto, Brooklyn
Patrick A. Bombino, Brooklyn
Robert Grieve, Houston
Ziad N. Sakhleh, Houston

The indictment accused the defendants of using pretexting to gather information on 12,000 people between January 2004 and May 2007, though, in a plea agreement the Torrellas admitted to using the illegal technique on only 1,800 subjects.

Under the indictment, the Torellas could have served up to 32 years in prison; with their plea agreements, they were sentenced to only six months in prison followed by two years of supervised release. The jail terms were staggered so that one parent could remain at home with the couple’s children while the other serves the prison sentence.