Man Pleads No Contest in ChoicePoint ID Theft

A North Hollywood man accused of infiltrating the databases of one of the nation’s largest collectors of consumer information pleaded no contest Thursday to felony identity theft.

Olatunji Oluwatosin, 41, was sentenced to 16 months in state prison for his role in a fraud ring that illegally accessed the credit reports, Social Security numbers and other personal information of tens of thousands of people.

Five other counts against Oluwatosin, a Nigerian national, were dropped. He could be deported after his sentence is served.

Investigators said they expected to make more arrests in the massive identity theft case, which targeted records maintained by ChoicePoint Inc. The company sells information culled from public records to landlords, insurance companies and government agencies.

Jane Robison, a Los Angeles County district attorney spokeswoman, called Oluwatosin’s arrest and prosecution part of a “much larger investigation into fraudulent access to ChoicePoint.”

Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators said the ring established dozens of fake business accounts with ChoicePoint and enjoyed access to the company’s databases for more than a year.

ChoicePoint said this week that as many as 145,000 records might have been compromised. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Duane Decker said Thursday that “those numbers are low.” He wouldn’t elaborate.

ChoicePoint spokesman James Lee called Oluwatosin’s plea “a step in the right direction.”

Paul Luehr, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, said that “considering the number of citizens that were affected, 16 months is light compared to what other white-collar criminals would receive.” But such crimes are very difficult to prove, Luehr and others said, and financial damages are equally tough to calculate.

“It’s hard to put a price on privacy, and it’s even harder to translate that value into prison time,” said Jennifer Granick, who has defended computer hackers and is executive director of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. The sentence “is relatively high for a first-time offense, except they think [the scam] was very well planned and sophisticated.”

Prevention is more important than any length of sentence, she said, because most identity thieves believe they have little chance of getting caught.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick Frey said Oluwatosin was given no immunity against future charges. Oluwatosin’s lawyer, public defender Michael Enger, said the agreement didn’t require his client to cooperate with investigators.

Oluwatosin’s plea settled charges that he appropriated personal information about a person identified as John Galloway in an attempt to open a ChoicePoint account.

According to testimony at Oluwatosin’s December preliminary hearing, the case began to break when a ChoicePoint employee became suspicious of an application to open an account from a company called MBS Financial. The employee gave Decker, the detective, a fax number provided by the applicant where documents could be sent to complete the application process.

The number was to a Copymat shop in Hollywood. When Oluwatosin picked up the faxes, he had with him applications in the name of Galloway and another man, Decker testified.

Contacted later, Galloway told investigators that he didn’t know Oluwatosin.