FRESNO — Two married, now-former members of the U.S. Navy have been arrested and charged with conspiring to make use of their positions to entry personal data for hundreds of individuals, which they allegedly offered to 3rd events on the Darkish Net, in response to court docket data.
When the ill-gotten positive factors started to dry up, the couple allegedly tried a second, extra daring scheme, going so far as to forge a letter from the commander of a nuclear-powered plane provider, in response to the grievance.
Marquis Hooper, and his spouse, Natasha Chalk, have been charged Thursday with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated id theft, each federal offenses. Hooper, a serviceman from 2008-18, labored as an informations safety supervisor on the Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Japan, in response to the legal grievance.
The grievance alleges that in August 2018, Hooper used his place to entry the database for a enterprise, which is referred to solely as Firm #1. Utilizing the database, he and Chalk — a reservist assigned to Naval Air Station Lemoore — allegedly ran hundreds of database searches for peoples’ personal data, ignoring warnings that the database was “for presidency functions solely.” They got here up with data for greater than 9,000 individuals, the grievance says.
“Hooper and Chalk obtained digital foreign money value not less than $160,000 from third events in change for stories and different data from the database on hundreds of people, the grievance alleges, later including that in addition they used the knowledge to aim to entry victims’ financial institution accounts.
After Firm #1 stopped making the database out there to them, the couple allegedly solid a letter purporting to be from the Commanding Officer of the usS. George Washington to be able to regain database entry.
The charging data comprise a forfeiture allegation via which the federal government will try to seize any property “derived from proceeds traceable” to the alleged fraud spree.
