Sprint employees rack up $15 million in ID theft scam

September 7, 2010 – 8:32 am

Nine former Sprint employees have been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The defendants accessed customer accounts over 16,000 times without authorization, and used the information to create clones of the customers’ cell phones.

The cloned phones were then used to make unauthorized calls, totaling $15 million. A large portion of the calls were international.

According to reports, the defendants worked from January to June 2010 for an unidentified national cell phone service provider, with two of them working in New York, four in New Jersey, and three working in Tampa, Fla. They used the company’s computer network to obtain confidential information about the cell phones of thousands of customers without authorization.

Sprint company officials have declined to comment.

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