No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but, just in case it isn't obvious to all, IDA is dead.
IDA is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme. And it's dead.
----------
Hat tip-and-a-half: Brian Krebs
Operating until recently sometimes out of New Zealand and sometimes out of Vietnam, Mr Hieu Minh Ngo is currently locked up in New Hampshire as a guest of the Justice Department and looks like spending the next 45 years in prison in the US.
An entrepreneurial young man – he's only 24 now, 69 when he gets out – Mr Ngo had two illicit web-based businesses, superget.info and findget.me, which have between them sold the personal details of more than half a million Americans. Their 1,300 customers make money fraudulently by using this information to take out loans in the victim's name, for example, or to make false tax refund requests.
Mr Ngo's companies bought this information from a legitimate company, Court Ventures, which, in turn, bought it from another legitimate company, US Info Search.
How did the information cross the line between the legitimacy of Court Ventures and the criminality of superget.info and findget.me? Rather suspiciously – Mr Ngo paid Court Ventures with monthly wire transfers from Singapore.
So far we've had new Zealand, Vietnam, Singapore and the US. We can throw in Guam, too – the US Secret Service contacted Mr Ngo and offered him some illegal business which required him to leave Vietnam, where they couldn't arrest him, and come to Guam, where they could and did.
It's all quite exotic for us Brits. Interesting in its way. But nothing to do with us, surely.
Wrong.
