http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7954620/ Let's see: 700000 records, stolen by 9 people, each manually searching their bank's records Say it takes 2 minutes to find and print a match from a search. 700000 * 2min / 9 people = 2600 hours /person essentially a full year's work with a lot of overtime. Either these people were not doing much work for the banks, or some of these records were transferred in mass, without even a search by name. In either case, it's likely that many of these account records were not actually for the debtors being sought by the collection agencies.
Clarification from: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/massive_data_th_1.html#comments "The mastermind of this scheme was a skip tracer who had contracts with a lot of attorneys and collection agencies to find people, and concomitantly, their assets. He sent the lists provided by the attorneys to his contacts in the bank (usually branch managers), who in turn gave them to the rank & file workers to do the search. For every hit, he paid the manager $10, who in turn, gave $3 to $6 to the worker bees. The ringleader, Orazio Lembo, was paid $70 to $100 for each hit he got; the attorneys then were able to file suit against the debtor and/or garnish wages, because they had received the exact list of the debtor's assets. ... Posted by: Richard R. Blake at May 24, 2005 02:01 PM" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
