04 August 2008

Ex-Countrywide Employee Arrested over Massive Info Theft

John Sterlicchi

The FBI has arrested a former Countrywide Financial Corp. employee and another man in an alleged scheme to steal and sell the sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, of as many as two million mortgage applicants, the Los Angeles Times has reported.

Authorities arrested Rene L. Rebollo Jr., 36, who had worked as a senior financial analyst at Full Spectrum Lending, Countrywide's subprime lending division. He was charged with unauthorized access to a financial institution's computers.

Also arrested was 25 year old Wahid Siddiqi. Authorities alleged that he was a reseller of Countrywide data.

"Some, perhaps most, and possibly all the names were being sold to people in the mortgage industry to make new pitches," said US attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek.

In an affidavit filed in federal court, the FBI said Rebollo had voluntarily described the scheme. Rebollo said he would charge $400 or $500 for batches of thousands of "leads" -- personal and account information that presumably would help outside loan agents solicit new mortgages from the Countrywide applicants, some of whom had been denied loans by the Calabasas company.

Authorities said they didn't know whether any of the information had been used for outright fraud, such as identity theft, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Rebollo would copy information on about 20 000 customers at a time on Sunday nights by using a Full Spectrum computer that did not have the same security features that other machines in the office had, according to the affidavit.

At that rate, the US attorney's office said, Rebollo would have compromised up to two million customer profiles for about 2.5 cents each -- an astonishingly small amount considering the importance of the material. Mortgage leads are among the most expensive for sale because of the potential payoffs to intermediaries when loans are made.

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