British ex-cop owns a database of 40 million stolen identities

Stolen identities are traded on the web all the time. The information can be as simple as credit card information and email address or in some case complete records. It is this type of trading of personal information that a British company by the name Lucid Intelligence intercepts and then stores in their own database. This database contains the records of four million Britons and 40 million people world-wide, most of which are Americans.

The database is controlled by Colin Holder who happens to be a retired Metropolitan police officer. He has spent the last four years collecting all this data through sources that include police departments around the world, which includes both the British police departments and the FBI in the US. AS well he gets information from anti-phishing and hacking groups groups.

Of course all this hasn’t come freely as Mr. Holder has invested £160,000 into the project so far. In order to recoup that money as well as turn a profit Mr. Holder is planning on letting the public access his database but for a fee.

This whole thing isn’t being done without some concerns being voiced about protection of personal data. This in turn has the Information Commissioner keeping a close eye on the database as it grows.

The legality of the database could be put to the test in the coming week. The Information Commissioner’s Office said it could not endorse a commercial service or make a ruling on its validity unless someone made a complaint. But the privacy watchdog said it had “provided advice to help the company comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act”.

Source: Times Online :: Four million British identities are up for sale on the internet

Yup I can see how moving everything we do to the cloud is going to be safer – not!