In April, online mortgage broker LendingTree Inc. filed a suit claiming that two of its former employees gave prospective brokers unauthorized access to information on potentially millions of clients. The FBI is investigating that case as well, but authorities said the two were unrelated.
Social Security numbers alone generally fetch dollars, not pennies, since they can be used to open new bank accounts.
"It's the potential for new-account fraud that arises when Social Security accounts are compromised," said Beth Givens, director of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "That's the most serious kind of financial identity theft," because large amounts can be involved and the fraud is more difficult to detect than it is on preexisting accounts.
"This guy obviously didn't do his homework. He doesn't know the value of these on the black market," she said.
Givens said the breach was among the 10 largest involving sensitive information in the last 18 months.
A January 2007 breach at retailer T.J. Maxx exposed 45 million credit card numbers. Six months later, Certegy Check Services Inc. lost information on 8 million accounts to an insider. In March, the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain reported the theft of data on more than 4 million accounts.
In the most recent case, Countrywide detected the breach and alerted federal authorities, according to Suzy Martin, a spokeswoman for the company, which was acquired by Bank of America on July 1.
On July 15, Rebollo voluntarily turned over to the FBI a flash drive he used to download the information and a personal computer, according to Ryan. The agent said in his affidavit that he pulled up about 40 spreadsheets at random from the flash drive.
"I observed large quantities of names associated with several columns of numeric data," Ryan wrote. "These columns contained telephone numbers, addresses and Social Security account numbers. Each spreadsheet contained several thousand lines of data."
Rebollo's attorney later called to say Rebollo had revoked permission for the FBI to search the drive and computer, and the searches stopped "pending further discussions regarding Rebollo's potential cooperation in the investigation," Ryan said.
A criminal complaint against Rebollo said that he earned about $65,000 a year at Countrywide and had opened a personal bank account for holding what he estimated to be up to $70,000 in proceeds from Countrywide data sales.
The complaint said Siddiqi sold computer discs containing data on Countrywide customers to a witness working for the FBI, taking in $4,000 for about 38,000 customer profiles.
During the housing boom, Countrywide was the nation's largest mortgage lender and competed in all segments of the home-loan business, including subprime loans for high-risk borrowers. Subprime lenders aggressively courted these borrowers, hoping to persuade them to refinance their mortgages and replace them with new loans that featured low initial "teaser" interest rates.
--
scott.reckard@latimes.com
joseph.menn@latimes.com
