Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based company that bills itself as the largest provider of software and technology services to the United States public sector, is battling a network intrusion that has disrupted its operations. The company declined to discuss the exact cause of the disruption, but their response so far is straight out of the playbook for responding to ransomware incidents.

Plano, Texas-based Tyler Technologies [NYSE:TYL] has some 5,300 employees and brought in revenues of more than $1 billion in 2019. It sells a broad range of services to state and local governments, including appraisal and tax software, integrated software for courts and justice agencies, enterprise financial software systems, public safety software, records/document management software solutions and transportation software solutions for schools.

Earlier today, the normal content on tylertech.com was replaced with a notice saying the site was offline. In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity after the markets closed central time, Tyler Tech said early this morning the company became aware that an unauthorized intruder had gained access to its phone and information technology systems.

“Upon discovery and out of an abundance of caution, we shut down points of access to external systems and immediately began investigating and remediating the problem,” Tyler’s Chief Information Officer Matt Bieri said. “We have since engaged outside IT security and forensics experts to conduct a detailed review and help us securely restore affected equipment. We are implementing enhanced monitoring systems, and we have notified law enforcement.”

“At this time and based on the evidence available to us to-date, all indications are that the impact of this incident is limited to our internal network and phone systems,” their statement continues. “We currently have no reason to believe that any client data, client servers, or hosted systems were affected.”

While it may be comforting to hear that last bit, the reality is that it is still early in the company’s investigation. Also, ransomware has moved well past just holding a victim firm’s IT systems hostage in exchange for an extortion payment: These days, ransomware purveyors will offload as much personal and financial data that they can before unleashing their malware, and then often demand a second ransom payment in exchange for a promise to delete the stolen information or to refrain from publishing it online.

Tyler Technologies declined to say how the intrusion is affecting its customers. But several readers who work in IT roles at local government systems that rely on Tyler Tech said the outage had disrupted the ability of people to pay their water bills or court payments.

“Tyler has access to a lot of these servers in cities and counties for remote support, so it was very thoughtful of them to keep everyone in the dark and possibly exposed if the attackers made off with remote support credentials while waiting for the stock market to close,” said one reader who asked to remain anonymous.

Depending on how long it takes for Tyler to recover from this incident, it could have a broad impact on the ability of many states and localities to process payments for services or provide various government resources online.

Tyler Tech has pivoted on the threat of ransomware as a selling point for many of its services, using its presence on social media to promote ransomware survival guides and incident response checklists. With any luck, the company was following some of its own advice and will weather this storm quickly.

U.S. authorities today announced criminal charges and financial sanctions against two Russian men accused of stealing nearly $17 million worth of virtual currencies in a series of phishing attacks throughout 2017 and 2018 that spoofed websites for some of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges.

The Justice Department unsealed indictments against Russian nationals Danil Potekhin and Dmitirii Karasavidi, alleging the duo was responsible for a sophisticated phishing and money laundering campaign that resulted in the theft of $16.8 million in cryptocurrencies and fiat money from victims.

Separately, the U.S. Treasury Department announced economic sanctions against Potekhin and Karasavidi, effectively freezing all property and interests of these persons (subject to U.S. jurisdiction) and making it a crime to transact with them.

According to the indictments, the two men set up fake websites that spoofed login pages for the currency exchanges Binance, Gemini and Poloniex. Armed with stolen login credentials, the men allegedly stole more than $10 million from 142 Binance victims, $5.24 million from 158 Poloniex users, and $1.17 million from 42 Gemini customers.

Prosecutors say the men then laundered the stolen funds through an array of intermediary cryptocurrency accounts — including compromised and fictitiously created accounts — on the targeted cryptocurrency exchange platforms. In addition, the two are alleged to have artificially inflated the value of their ill-gotten gains by engaging in cryptocurrency price manipulation using some of the stolen funds.

For example, investigators alleged Potekhin and Karasavidi used compromised Poloniex accounts to place orders to purchase large volumes of “GAS,” the digital currency token used to pay the cost of executing transactions on the NEO blockchain — China’s first open source blockchain platform.

“Using digital crurency in one victim Poloniex account, they placed an order to purchase approximately 8,000 GAS, thereby immediately increasing the market price of GAS from approximately $18 to $2,400,” the indictment explains.

Potekhin and others then converted the artificially inflated GAS in their own fictitious Poloniex accounts into other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC). From the complaint:

“Before the Eight Fictitious Poloniex Accounts were frozen, POTEKHIN and others transferred approximately 759 ETH to nine digital currency addresses. Through a sophisticated and layered manner, the ETH from these nine digital currency addresses was sent through multiple intermediary accounts, before ultimately being deposited into a Bitfinex account controlled by Karasavidi.”

The Treasury’s action today lists several of the cryptocurrency accounts thought to have been used by the defendants. Searching on some of those accounts at various cryptocurrency transaction tracking sites points to a number of phishing victims.

“I would like to blow your bitch ass away, if you even had the balls to show yourself,” exclaimed one victim, posting in a comment on the Etherscan lookup service.

One victim said he contemplated suicide after being robbed of his ETH holdings in a 2017 phishing attack. Another said he’d been relieved of funds needed to pay for his 3-year-old daughter’s medical treatment.

“You and your team will leave a trail and will be found,” wrote one victim, using the handle ‘Illfindyou.’ “You’ll only be able to hide behind the facade for a short while. Go steal from whales you piece of shit.”

There is potentially some good news for victims of these phishing attacks. According to the Treasury Department, millions of dollars in virtual currency and U.S. dollars traced to Karasavidi’s account was seized in a forfeiture action by the United States Secret Service.

Whether any of those funds can be returned to victims of this phishing spree remains to be seen. And assuming that does happen, it could take years. In February 2020, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about being contacted by an Internal Revenue Service investigator seeking to return funds seized seven years earlier as part of the governments 2013 seizure of Liberty Reserve, a virtual currency service that acted as a $6 billion hub for the cybercrime world.

Today’s action is the latest indication that the Treasury Department is increasingly willing to use its authority to restrict the financial resources tied to various cybercrime activities. Earlier this month, the agency’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) added three Russian nationals and a host of cryptocurrency addresses to its sanctions lists in a case involving efforts by Russian online troll farms to influence the 2018 mid-term elections.

In June, OFAC took action against six Nigerian nationals suspected of stealing $6 million from U.S. businesses and individuals through Business Email Compromise fraud and romance scams.

And in 2019, OFAC sanctioned 17 members allegedly associated with “Evil Corp.,” an Eastern European cybercrime syndicate that has stolen more than $100 million from small businesses via malicious software over the past decade.

A copy of the indictments against Potekhin and Karasavidi is available here (PDF).

Microsoft today released updates to remedy nearly 130 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and supported software. None of the flaws are known to be currently under active exploitation, but 23 of them could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control of Windows computers with little or no help from users.

The majority of the most dangerous or “critical” bugs deal with issues in Microsoft’s various Windows operating systems and its web browsers, Internet Explorer and Edge. September marks the seventh month in a row Microsoft has shipped fixes for more than 100 flaws in its products, and the fourth month in a row that it fixed more than 120.

Among the chief concerns for enterprises this month is CVE-2020-16875, which involves a critical flaw in the email software Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 and 2019. An attacker could leverage the Exchange bug to run code of his choosing just by sending a booby-trapped email to a vulnerable Exchange server.

“That doesn’t quite make it wormable, but it’s about the worst-case scenario for Exchange servers,” said Dustin Childs, of Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “We have seen the previously patched Exchange bug CVE-2020-0688 used in the wild, and that requires authentication. We’ll likely see this one in the wild soon. This should be your top priority.”

Also not great for companies to have around is CVE-2020-1210, which is a remote code execution flaw in supported versions of Microsoft Sharepoint document management software that bad guys could attack by uploading a file to a vulnerable Sharepoint site. Security firm Tenable notes that this bug is reminiscent of CVE-2019-0604, another Sharepoint problem that’s been exploited for cybercriminal gains since April 2019.

Microsoft fixed at least five other serious bugs in Sharepoint versions 2010 through 2019 that also could be used to compromise systems running this software. And because ransomware purveyors have a history of seizing upon Sharepoint flaws to wreak havoc inside enterprises, companies should definitely prioritize deployment of these fixes, says Alan Liska, senior security architect at Recorded Future.

Todd Schell at Ivanti reminds us that Patch Tuesday isn’t just about Windows updates: Google has shipped a critical update for its Chrome browser that resolves at least five security flaws that are rated high severity. If you use Chrome and notice an icon featuring a small upward-facing arrow inside of a circle to the right of the address bar, it’s time to update. Completely closing out Chrome and restarting it should apply the pending updates.

Once again, there are no security updates available today for Adobe’s Flash Player, although the company did ship a non-security software update for the browser plugin. The last time Flash got a security update was June 2020, which may suggest researchers and/or attackers have stopped looking for flaws in it. Adobe says it will retire the plugin at the end of this year, and Microsoft has said it plans to completely remove the program from all Microsoft browsers via Windows Update by then.

Before you update with this month’s patch batch, please make sure you have backed up your system and/or important files. It’s not uncommon for Windows updates to hose one’s system or prevent it from booting properly, and some updates even have known to erase or corrupt files.

So do yourself a favor and backup before installing any patches. Windows 10 even has some built-in tools to help you do that, either on a per-file/folder basis or by making a complete and bootable copy of your hard drive all at once.

And if you wish to ensure Windows has been set to pause updating so you can back up your files and/or system before the operating system decides to reboot and install patches on its own schedule, see this guide.

As always, if you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a better-than-even chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with some helpful tips.

Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks. Sendgrid’s parent company Twilio says it is working on a plan to require multi-factor authentication for all of its customers, but that solution may not come fast enough for organizations having trouble dealing with the fallout in the meantime.

Many companies use Sendgrid to communicate with their customers via email, or else pay marketing firms to do that on their behalf using Sendgrid’s systems. Sendgrid takes steps to validate that new customers are legitimate businesses, and that emails sent through its platform carry the proper digital signatures that other companies can use to validate that the messages have been authorized by its customers.

But this also means when a Sendgrid customer account gets hacked and used to send malware or phishing scams, the threat is particularly acute because a large number of organizations allow email from Sendgrid’s systems to sail through their spam-filtering systems.

To make matters worse, links included in emails sent through Sendgrid are obfuscated (mainly for tracking deliverability and other metrics), so it is not immediately clear to recipients where on the Internet they will be taken when they click.

Dealing with compromised customer accounts is a constant challenge for any organization doing business online today, and certainly Sendgrid is not the only email marketing platform dealing with this problem. But according to multiple emails from readers, recent threads on several anti-spam discussion lists, and interviews with people in the anti-spam community, over the past few months there has been a marked increase in malicious, phishous and outright spammy email being blasted out via Sendgrid’s servers.

Rob McEwen is CEO of Invaluement.com, an anti-spam firm whose data on junk email trends are used to improve the spam-blocking technologies deployed by several Fortune 100 companies. McEwen said no other email service provider has come close to generating the volume of spam that’s been emanating from Sendgrid accounts lately.

“As far as the nasty criminal phishes and viruses, I think there’s not even a close second in terms of how bad it’s been with Sendgrid over the past few months,” he said.

Trying to filter out bad emails coming from a major email provider that so many legitimate companies rely upon to reach their customers can be a dicey business. If you filter the emails too aggressively you end up with an unacceptable number of “false positives,” i.e., benign or even desirable emails that get flagged as spam and sent to the junk folder or blocked altogether.

But McEwen said the incidence of malicious spam coming from Sendgrid has gotten so bad that he recently launched a new anti-spam block list specifically to filter out email from Sendgrid accounts that have been known to be blasting large volumes of junk or malicious email.

“Before I implemented this in my own filtering system a week ago, I was getting three to four phone calls or stern emails a week from angry customers wondering why these malicious emails were getting through to their inboxes,” McEwen said. “And I just am not seeing anything this egregious in terms of viruses and spams from the other email service providers.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Sendgrid parent firm Twilio acknowledged the company had recently seen an increase in compromised customer accounts being abused for spam. While Sendgrid does allow customers to use multi-factor authentication (also known as two-factor authentication or 2FA), this protection is not mandatory.

But Twilio Chief Security Officer Steve Pugh said the company is working on changes that would require customers to use some form of 2FA in addition to usernames and passwords.

“Twilio believes that requiring 2FA for customer accounts is the right thing to do, and we’re working towards that end,” Pugh said. “2FA has proven to be a powerful tool in securing communications channels. This is part of the reason we acquired Authy and created a line of account security products and services. Twilio, like other platforms, is forming a plan on how to better secure our customers’ accounts through native technologies such as Authy and additional account level controls to mitigate known attack vectors.”

Requiring customers to use some form of 2FA would go a long way toward neutralizing the underground market for compromised Sendgrid accounts, which are sold by a variety of cybercriminals who specialize in gaining access to accounts by targeting users who re-use the same passwords across multiple websites.

One such individual, who goes by the handle “Kromatix” on several forums, is currently selling access to more than 400 compromised Sendgrid user accounts. The pricing attached to each account is based on volume of email it can send in a given month. Accounts that can send up to 40,000 emails a month go for $15, whereas those capable of blasting 10 million missives a month sell for $400.

“I have a large supply of cracked Sendgrid accounts that can be used to generate an API key which you can then plug into your mailer of choice and send massive amounts of emails with ensured delivery,” Kromatix wrote in an Aug. 23 sales thread. “Sendgrid servers maintain a very good reputation with [email service providers] so your content becomes much more likely to get into the inbox so long as your setup is correct.”

Neil Schwartzman, executive director of the anti-spam group CAUCE, said Sendgrid’s 2FA plans are long overdue, noting that the company bought Authy back in 2015.

“Single-factor authentication for a company like this in 2020 is just ludicrous given the potential damage and malicious content we’re seeing,” Schwartzman said.

“I understand that it’s a task to invoke 2FA, and given the volume of customers Sendgrid has that’s something to consider because there’s going to be a lot of customer overhead involved,” he continued. “But it’s not like your bank, social media account, email and plenty of other places online don’t already insist on it.”

Schwartzman said if Twilio doesn’t act quickly enough to fix the problem on its end, the major email providers of the world (think Google, Microsoft and Apple) — and their various machine-learning anti-spam algorithms — may do it for them.

“There is a tipping point after which receiving firms start to lose patience and start to more aggressively filter this stuff,” he said. “If seeing a Sendgrid email according to machine learning becomes a sign of abuse, trust me the machines will make the decisions even if the people don’t.”

At the height of his cybercriminal career, the hacker known as “Hieupc” was earning $125,000 a month running a bustling identity theft service that siphoned consumer dossiers from some of the world’s top data brokers. That is, until his greed and ambition played straight into an elaborate snare set by the U.S. Secret Service. Now, after more than seven years in prison Hieupc is back in his home country and hoping to convince other would-be cybercrooks to use their computer skills for good.

For several years beginning around 2010, a lone teenager in Vietnam named Hieu Minh Ngo ran one of the Internet’s most profitable and popular services for selling “fullz,” stolen identity records that included a consumer’s name, date of birth, Social Security number and email and physical address.

Ngo got his treasure trove of consumer data by hacking and social engineering his way into a string of major data brokers. By the time the Secret Service caught up with him in 2013, he’d made over $3 million selling fullz data to identity thieves and organized crime rings operating throughout the United States.

Matt O’Neill is the Secret Service agent who in February 2013 successfully executed a scheme to lure Ngo out of Vietnam and into Guam, where the young hacker was arrested and sent to the mainland U.S. to face prosecution. O’Neill now heads the agency’s Global Investigative Operations Center, which supports investigations into transnational organized criminal groups.

O’Neill said he opened the investigation into Ngo’s identity theft business after reading about it in a 2011 KrebsOnSecurity story, “How Much is Your Identity Worth?” According to O’Neill, what’s remarkable about Ngo is that to this day his name is virtually unknown among the pantheon of infamous convicted cybercriminals, the majority of whom were busted for trafficking in huge quantities of stolen credit cards.

Ngo’s businesses enabled an entire generation of cybercriminals to commit an estimated $1 billion worth of new account fraud, and to sully the credit histories of countless Americans in the process.

“I don’t know of any other cybercriminal who has caused more material financial harm to more Americans than Ngo,” O’Neill told KrebsOnSecurity. “He was selling the personal information on more than 200 million Americans and allowing anyone to buy it for pennies apiece.”

Freshly released from the U.S. prison system and deported back to Vietnam, Ngo is currently finishing up a mandatory three-week COVID-19 quarantine at a government-run facility. He contacted KrebsOnSecurity from inside this facility with the stated aim of telling his little-known story, and to warn others away from following in his footsteps.

BEGINNINGS

Ten years ago, then 19-year-old hacker Ngo was a regular on the Vietnamese-language computer hacking forums. Ngo says he came from a middle-class family that owned an electronics store, and that his parents bought him a computer when he was around 12 years old. From then on out, he was hooked.

In his late teens, he traveled to New Zealand to study English at a university there. By that time, he was already an administrator of several dark web hacker forums, and between his studies he discovered a vulnerability in the school’s network that exposed payment card data.

“I did contact the IT technician there to fix it, but nobody cared so I hacked the whole system,” Ngo recalled. “Then I used the same vulnerability to hack other websites. I was stealing lots of credit cards.”

Ngo said he decided to use the card data to buy concert and event tickets from Ticketmaster, and then sell the tickets at a New Zealand auction site called TradeMe. The university later learned of the intrusion and Ngo’s role in it, and the Auckland police got involved. Ngo’s travel visa was not renewed after his first semester ended, and in retribution he attacked the university’s site, shutting it down for at least two days.

Ngo said he started taking classes again back in Vietnam, but soon found he was spending most of his time on cybercrime forums.

“I went from hacking for fun to hacking for profits when I saw how easy it was to make money stealing customer databases,” Ngo said. “I was hanging out with some of my friends from the underground forums and we talked about planning a new criminal activity.”

“My friends said doing credit cards and bank information is very dangerous, so I started thinking about selling identities,” Ngo continued. “At first I thought well, it’s just information, maybe it’s not that bad because it’s not related to bank accounts directly. But I was wrong, and the money I started making very fast just blinded me to a lot of things.”

MICROBILT

His first big target was a consumer credit reporting company in New Jersey called MicroBilt.

“I was hacking into their platform and stealing their customer database so I could use their customer logins to access their [consumer] databases,” Ngo said. “I was in their systems for almost a year without them knowing.”

Very soon after gaining access to MicroBilt, Ngo says, he stood up Superget[.]info, a website that advertised the sale of individual consumer records. Ngo said initially his service was quite manual, requiring customers to request specific states or consumers they wanted information on, and he would conduct the lookups by hand.

“I was trying to get more records at once, but the speed of our Internet in Vietnam then was very slow,” Ngo recalled. “I couldn’t download it because the database was so huge. So I just manually search for whoever need identities.”

But Ngo would soon work out how to use more powerful servers in the United States to automate the collection of larger amounts of consumer data from MicroBilt’s systems, and from other data brokers. As I wrote of Ngo’s service back in November 2011:

“Superget lets users search for specific individuals by name, city, and state. Each “credit” costs USD$1, and a successful hit on a Social Security number or date of birth costs 3 credits each. The more credits you buy, the cheaper the searches are per credit: Six credits cost $4.99; 35 credits cost $20.99, and $100.99 buys you 230 credits. Customers with special needs can avail themselves of the “reseller plan,” which promises 1,500 credits for $500.99, and 3,500 credits for $1000.99.

“Our Databases are updated EVERY DAY,” the site’s owner enthuses. “About 99% nearly 100% US people could be found, more than any sites on the internet now.”

Ngo’s intrusion into MicroBilt eventually was detected, and the company kicked him out of their systems. But he says he got back in using another vulnerability.

“I was hacking them and it was back and forth for months,” Ngo said. “They would discover [my accounts] and fix it, and I would discover a new vulnerability and hack them again.”

COURT (AD)VENTURES, AND EXPERIAN

This game of cat and mouse continued until Ngo found a much more reliable and stable source of consumer data: A U.S. based company called Court Ventures, which aggregated public records from court documents. Ngo wasn’t interested in the data collected by Court Ventures, but rather in its data sharing agreement with a third-party data broker called U.S. Info Search, which had access to far more sensitive consumer records.

Using forged documents and more than a few lies, Ngo was able to convince Court Ventures that he was a private investigator based in the United States.

“At first [when] I sign up they asked for some documents to verify,” Ngo said. “So I just used some skill about social engineering and went through the security check.”

Then, in March 2012, something even more remarkable happened: Court Ventures was purchased by Experian, one of the big three major consumer credit bureaus in the United States. And for nine months after the acquisition, Ngo was able to maintain his access.

“After that, the database was under control by Experian,” he said. “I was paying Experian good money, thousands of dollars a month.”

Whether anyone at Experian ever performed due diligence on the accounts grandfathered in from Court Ventures is unclear. But it wouldn’t have taken a rocket surgeon to figure out that this particular customer was up to something fishy.

For one thing, Ngo paid the monthly invoices for his customers’ data requests using wire transfers from a multitude of banks around the world, but mostly from new accounts at financial institutions in China, Malaysia and Singapore.

O’Neill said Ngo’s identity theft website generated tens of thousands of queries each month. For example, the first invoice Court Ventures sent Ngo in December 2010 was for 60,000 queries. By the time Experian acquired the company, Ngo’s service had attracted more than 1,400 regular customers, and was averaging 160,000 monthly queries.

More importantly, Ngo’s profit margins were enormous.

“His service was quite the racket,” he said. “Court Ventures charged him 14 cents per lookup, but he charged his customers about $1 for each query.”

By this time, O’Neill and his fellow Secret Service agents had served dozens of subpoenas tied to Ngo’s identity theft service, including one that granted them access to the email account he used to communicate with customers and administer his site. The agents discovered several emails from Ngo instructing an accomplice to pay Experian using wire transfers from different Asian banks.

TLO

Working with the Secret Service, Experian quickly zeroed in on Ngo’s accounts and shut them down. Aware of an opportunity here, the Secret Service contacted Ngo through an intermediary in the United Kingdom — a known, convicted cybercriminal who agreed to play along. The U.K.-based collaborator told Ngo he had personally shut down Ngo’s access to Experian because he had been there first and Ngo was interfering with his business.

“The U.K. guy told Ngo, ‘Hey, you’re treading on my turf, and I decided to lock you out. But as long as you’re paying a vig through me, your access won’t go away’,” O’Neill recalled.

The U.K. cybercriminal, acting at the behest of the Secret Service and U.K. authorities, told Ngo that if he wanted to maintain his access, he could agree to meet up in person. But Ngo didn’t immediately bite on the offer.

Instead, he weaseled his way into another huge data store. In much the same way he’d gained access to Court Ventures, Ngo got an account at a company called TLO, another data broker that sells access to extremely detailed and sensitive information on most Americans.

TLO’s service is accessible to law enforcement agencies and to a limited number of vetted professionals who can demonstrate they have a lawful reason to access such information. In 2014, TLO was acquired by Trans Union, one of the other three big U.S. consumer credit reporting bureaus.

And for a short time, Ngo used his access to TLO to power a new iteration of his business — an identity theft service rebranded as usearching[.]info. This site also pulled consumer data from a payday loan company that Ngo hacked into, as documented in my Sept. 2012 story, ID Theft Service Tied to Payday Loan Sites. Ngo said the hacked payday loans site gave him instant access to roughly 1,000 new fullz records each day.

BLINDED BY GREED

By this time, Ngo was a multi-millionaire: His various sites and reselling agreements with three Russian-language cybercriminal stores online had earned him more than USD $3 million. He told his parents his money came from helping companies develop websites, and even used some of his ill-gotten gains to pay off the family’s debts (its electronics business had gone belly up, and a family member had borrowed but never paid back a significant sum of money).

But mostly, Ngo said, he spent his money on frivolous things, although he says he’s never touched drugs or alcohol.

“I spent it on vacations and cars and a lot of other stupid stuff,” he said.

When TLO locked Ngo out of his account there, the Secret Service used it as another opportunity for their cybercriminal mouthpiece in the U.K. to turn the screws on Ngo yet again.

“He told Ngo he’d locked him out again, and the he could do this all day long,” O’Neill said. “And if he truly wanted lasting access to all of these places he used to have access to, he would agree to meet and form a more secure partnership.”

After several months of conversing with his apparent U.K.-based tormentor, Ngo agreed to meet him in Guam to finalize the deal. Ngo says he understood at the time that Guam is an unincorporated territory of the United States, but that he discounted the chances that this was all some kind of elaborate law enforcement sting operation.

“I was so desperate to have a stable database, and I got blinded by greed and started acting crazy without thinking,” Ngo said. “Lots of people told me ‘Don’t go!,’ but I told them I have to try and see what’s going on.”

But immediately after stepping off of the plane in Guam, he was apprehended by Secret Service agents.

“One of the names of his identity theft services was findget[.]me,” O’Neill said. “We took that seriously, and we did like he asked.”

This is Part I of a multi-part series. Check back tomorrow (Aug. 27) for Part II, which will examine what investigators learned following Ngo’s arrest, and delve into his more recent effort to right the wrongs he’s done.