A fraudster was sentenced to over 17 years in prison for devising a scam where he registered fake debt collection companies to gain access to consumer PII, which he then used to open almost 600 fraudulent credit card accounts.
Adekunle Adetiloye, a Canadian resident born in Nigeria, incorporated two businesses which he claimed were debt collection companies. Posing as a debt collection company Adetiloye was able gain access to consumer data from commercial providers and steal 38,000 identities. About 500 of these identities were used to open nearly 600 credit cards from 22 major banks, and Adetiloye racked up $1.5 million on these fraudulent card accounts.
Authorities alleged that Adetiloye opened over 100 commercial mailboxes under the names of stolen identities for receiving the fraudulently opened credit cards. Actual losses to the 22 banks Adetiloye opened fraudulent credit cards with totaled $1.5 million according to the courts, but the potential losses were $5 million taking each card’s credit limit into account. The card issuers with the most losses from this scam were Citibank and Discover with $271,000 and $248,000 in losses respectively. U.S. Bank had the highest number of fraudulent accounts opened in Adetiloye’s scam with 130 and $76,000 in losses.
For More Information: Canadian man sentenced to 18 years in prison in 1 of largest credit card schemes in US history