Posted on August 18, 2009

Gov’t: Man Tried to Steal 130M Credit Card Numbers

Devlin Barrett, yahoo.com, August 17, 2009

Federal prosecutors on Monday charged a Miami man with the largest case of credit and debit card data theft ever in the United States.

Authorities said Albert Gonzales, 28, has broken his own record for identity theft by hacking into more retail networks to steal data from 130 million accounts.

Gonzales, who is already in jail awaiting trial in a hacking case, was indicted Monday in New Jersey, charged with conspiring with two other unnamed suspects to steal the private information.

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Gonzales allegedly devised a sophisticated attack to penetrate the computer networks, steal the card data, and send that data to computer servers in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine.

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Also last year, the Justice Department announced additional charges against Gonzales and others for hacking retail companies’ computers for the theft of approximately 40 million credit cards. At the time, that was believed to be the biggest single case of hacking private computer networks to steal credit card data