A Michigan man was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the hacking and theft of data belonging to more than 65,000 UPMC employees, the Justice Department said Oct. 18.
Justin Sean Johnson, 30, of Detroit, was charged in June 2020 and sentenced Oct. 15, 2021, to 60 months' incarceration for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and 24 months for aggravated identity theft for hacking into the Pittsburgh-based health system's human resource server databases in 2013 and 2014, according to a news release.
Mr. Johnson stole personal identifiable information and W-2 information belonging to more than 65,000 UPMC employees and then sold the data on the dark web to conspirators, who filed hundreds of false 1040 tax returns in 2014 using the employees' information, the Justice Department said.
The false 1040 filings claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars of false tax refunds, which conspirators turned into Amazon gift cards. Mr. Johnson also stole and sold nearly 90,000 additional non-UPMC sets of personal identifiable information to buyers on the dark web between 2014 and 2017. The scheme resulted in about $1.7 million in false IRS refunds, the Justice Department said.