A Louisiana man has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for improperly accessing the Healthcare.gov database and stealing more than 8,000 consumers' personal information for financial crimes.
Several times in November 2018, Colbi Trent Defiore, a then seasonal employee for a Virginia-based tech company that operates contact centers for Medicare enrollment for CMS, inappropriately accessed personal identifying information of more than 8,000 individuals in the Healthcare.gov database, according to a Dec. 10 news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Mr. Defiore worked at the company's Bogalusa, La.-based center, where he illegally searched the Healthcare.gov database, copied the results of his searches and emailed them to himself. He then used the personal information of at least five consumers to apply fraudulently for at least six credit cards, loans and lines of credit, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
"In total, [Mr. Defiore's] conduct caused reasonably foreseeable loss to the companies that operated the call center, including costs associated with responding to the offense, conducting a damage assessment, responding to and remediating damage, contacting consumers who were potential victims, and providing theft protection services for consumer-victims, in the amount of $587,000," the U.S. Justice Department's release states.