ID Fraud Case a Cautionary Tale for Business Travelers
A Colombian engineer pleaded guilty in federal court in Miami yesterday to a 16-count indictment concerning an identity fraud scheme that netted him up to $750,000 from unsuspecting business travelers worldwide and could easily be copied by other thieves.
To perpetrate the crimes, Mario Alberto Simbaqueba Bonilla, 40, simply checked into high-class hotels and installed keystroke “spy” software on computers in their business centers, reports the Miami Herald. Then, as business travelers and other hotel guests used the same computers to log into their personal accounts and conduct financial transactions, the spyware saved this information for Simbaqueba to retrieve remotely from another location.
Authorities say he installed spyware on computers in at least 25 hotels between 2004 and 2007, stealing the identities of at least 600 victims and using their funds and credit fraudulently obtained in their names to pay for a lavish globe-trotting lifestyle, the newspaper recounts. A former wife who is still at large allegedly cooperated in the scheme, helping Simbaqueba to conceal his whereabouts by allowing him to use her computer in Illinois as a base for his operations. The scheme reportedly was discovered only after 17 soldiers were fleeced of their payroll deposits and the Pentagon investigated, tracking an electronic evidence trail to him.
Simbaqueba faces a prison term of up to 10 years when he is sentenced in March on the conspiracy, fraud, and identity theft charges to which he pled guilty yesterday.
”I wish this was a complex scheme, but it was breathtakingly simple,” says U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta. Hence, other travelers who use hotel business centers are also vulnerable to such high-tech predators, he warns.
Most of the losses in Simbaqueba’s case reportedly were paid by banks, brokerages, airlines and other corporations.
