A Florida man was sentenced today to 27 months in prison for trying to purchase Social Security numbers and other data from an identity theft service that pulled consumer records from a subsidiary of credit bureau Experian.

Derric Theoc, 36, pleaded guilty to attempting to purchase Social Security and bank account records on more than 100 Americans with the intent to open credit card accounts and file fraudulent tax returns in the victims’ names. According to prosecutors, Theoc had purchased numerous records from Superget.info, a now-defunct online identity theft service that was run by Vietnamese individual named Hieu Minh Ngo.

Ngo was arrested in 2012 by U.S. Secret Service agents, after he was lured to Guam by an undercover investigator who’d proposed a business deal to expand Ngo’s personal consumer data stores. As part of a guilty plea, Ngo later admitted that he’d obtained personal information on consumers from a variety of data broker companies by posing as a private investigator based in the United States.

Among the biggest brokers that Ngo bought from was Court Ventures, a company that was acquired in March 2012 by Experian — one of the three major credit bureaus. Court records show that for almost ten months after Experian completed that acquisition, Ngo continued siphoning consumer data and paying for the information via cash wire transfers from a bank in Singapore.

After Ngo’s arrest, Secret Service investigators in early 2013 quietly assumed control over his identity theft service in the hopes of identifying and arresting at least some of his more than 1,000 paying customers.

Theoc is just the latest in a string of identity thieves to have been rounded up for attempting to purchase additional records after the service came under the government’s control. In May, I wrote about another big beneficiary of Ngo’s service: An identity theft ring of at least 32 people who were arrested last year for allegedly using the information to steal millions from more than 1,000 victims across the country.

In April, this publication featured a story about 28-year-old Dayton, Ohio resident Lance Ealy, whom the government alleges also used Ngo’s services to steal financial records used for tax return fraud.

In October 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that Experian’s subsidiary was a major contributor to Ngo’s identity theft service. In subsequent hearings on Capital Hill, Experian executives assured lawmakers with the curious contradiction that the company knew who the victims were and that they’d be taken care of, but that there was no evidence that any consumers had actually been harmed as a result of Experian’s oversight. It remains unclear if Experian, Court Ventures or any other firm duped by Ngo will ever be made to fully and publicly account for the damage done here, although earlier this year several state attorneys general announced that they’d launched their own investigation into the matter.

Tags: Court Ventures, Derric Theoc, Experian, Hieu Minh Ngo, identity theft service, Lance Ealy, superget.info