The FBI on Friday arrested a former Countrywide Financial Corp. employee and another man in an alleged scheme to steal and sell sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, of as many as 2 million mortgage applicants.
The breach in security, which occurred over a two-year period though July, was one of the largest in years, experts said.
The insider was identified as Rene L. Rebollo Jr., 36, who had worked as a senior financial analyst at Full Spectrum Lending, Countrywide's subprime lending division. He was arrested at his home in Pasadena and charged with unauthorized access to a financial institution's computers.
Authorities also arrested Wahid Siddiqi, 25, at his home in Thousand Oaks. 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," U.S. attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek said.
Rebollo's attorney, Michael V. Severo of Los Angeles, could not be reached for comment. Rebollo appeared in court Friday afternoon and was released on $80,000 bond.
Siddiqi was being held on a fraud charge pending a court appearance Monday, and prosecutors did not know whether he had a lawyer.
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.
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 by FBI Special Agent Richard P. Ryan.
At that rate, the U.S. attorney's office said, Rebollo would have compromised up to 2 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.
