Industry News
DOL manager charged in fraud scheme
May 17, 2005
A manager in the Jersey City office of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development (DOLWD) has been charged with official misconduct, conspiracy and disclosing data, according to Hackensack, New Jersey, Police Chief Charles Zisa. If convicted, the manager faces up to 30 years in jail.
Is he accused of stealing checks? No. Supplies? No. Equipment? No.
He is accused of stealing the Labor Department's client information—such as occupations, salaries and places of employment—and selling it to a man posing as a collections expert and private detective, who then resold the information to law firms and collection agencies. This pilfering of Labor Department data is part of a larger scheme that currently involves data theft from four banks across northern New Jersey. Seven bank employees, including managers and financial specialists, have been charged in addition to the scheme's ringleader and the Labor Department manager. This scheme, which may have compromised as many as 500,000 personal accounts, is the largest breach of banking security in the nation, according to a US Treasury Department official.
Specific details regarding the Labor Department data theft have not been made available to the public, so it is unknown whether the data was taken from wage records, unemployment insurance claims or job service applications, or some combination thereof. Regardless of what was stolen, this case demonstrates the urgent need for state workforce agencies to deploy transaction analysis or other audit trail techniques in order to monitor who is accessing, querying and altering agency records. In the hands of criminals, stolen data can be even more valuable than fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance checks, and is just as illegal.
Read the related article, "Scope of bank data theft grows to 676,000 customers."