3 Sentenced for Illegally Tapping TRW Credit Files

The owners of a Calabasas-based private detective agency were fined and sentenced to community service Monday for illegally tapping into the computers of a credit rating company to get information they passed to their clients, officials said.

Armand Grant, 59, president of Teltec Investigations, his son, Michael Grant, 31, the company’s vice president of operations, and Mark Kasden, 31, the firm’s general manager, had earlier pleaded no contest to felony charges of illegally accessing the TRW Inc. computer system to obtain personal credit histories, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Brent Collier.

“By obtaining passwords, they were able to illegally run hundreds of credit checks on people, which they passed on to clients as part of their research,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective David Simon.

It is against state and federal laws for private detective agencies to subscribe to or receive information from data information companies such as TRW, Collier said. “What they did is closer to invasion of privacy than it is to stealing,” Collier said.

But Michael Grant maintained that the 23-year-old company had done nothing wrong. “I don’t believe that any of these alleged crimes actually took place,” he said.

Armand Grant, who was charged with three counts of unauthorized use of a computer system, was given two years probation, fined $5,000 and sentenced to 200 hours of community service for his part in the scheme, Collier said.

Michael Grant was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 275 hours of community service.

The Grants also were required to pay about $3,300 to about 12 TRW subscribers whose access codes they used to retrieve data, Collier said.

Kasden was given 150 hours of community service, Collier said.