Experian Sued For Credit Scammer ‘Negligence’

The credit bureau is being sued for allegedly overlooking the fact that a scammer who resold consumer data through a criminal service was a customer of its data broker subsidiary Court Ventures for almost 10 months, cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported Tuesday (July 21).

Hieu Minh Ngo, the Vietnamese man who recently received a 13-year jail sentence for running the identity theft service, posed as a private investigator to gain access to almost 200 million consumer data records. According to Krebs, for the 10 months Ngo’s crimes went undetected by Experian, the consumer data searches were paid for with money received through wire transfers from Singapore.

It is estimated Ngo made roughly $2 million from his criminal activities, which affected 13,673 U.S. citizens whose sensitive data was sold through the illegal websites Superget.info and findget.me.

The lawsuit against Experian, which was filed July 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is seeking damages for the credit bureau’s suspected violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and numerous other statutes, Krebs confirmed.

Within the class action complaint, some of the requests the plaintiffs made to the court include forcing Experian to perform the following actions:

• Notify all known victims affected by Ngo’s service
• Provide victims with free credit monitoring services
• Establish a fund which will allow those affected by the identity theft service to see reimbursement in an effort to rectify the damages incurred

“The Security Lapse notice, as well as the above referenced protections, also will fulfill the promise made to Congress by Tony Hadley, Experian’s senior vice president of government affairs and public policy, that ‘we know who they [the Security Lapse victims] are, and we’re going to make sure they’re protected,'” the complaint states.

Experian has yet to provide comment or respond to the claims in court.

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