Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former co-worker
theregister.com
theregister.com
But looks like a sysadmin's access wasn't involved in the identity theft, despite what mention in the headline might suggest.
The only sysadmin angle I see on this story is that the identity theft might've (unclear) eventually permitted the perpetrator to pass pre-employment checks to get get some kind of remote sysadmin job at a hospital.
So I guess the relevance to IT (given this is The Register) is that your sysadmin (or DevOps(R) or whatever) people might not be who you they claim to be, in some freak situation of a person who'd get the victim jailed and then committed to a mental asylum...
Not the fact that the real Woods was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital and forced to take medication, simply for asserting he was who he actually was?
Not that somehow our justice system thinks "lying to a bank" should be worth 30 years in prison, but stealing someone's identity gives you a mere two years?
C'mon.
America's legal system at work. Now a judge can diagnose mental health conditions!
The shitty part of this isn't that the judges have that ability, there's a time and a place for that.
The bad part is that the system thought so little of him because he was poor and homeless that he couldn't convince them of his identity, despite having a social security card and a state ID from the state he was being prosecuted in. Everyone just assumed that the guy with the money was the "real" guy, because why would he impersonate a homeless person? I don't think Woods ever could have won, no amount of documentation would have convinced everyone.
It's awful that the people that finally believed him were a hospital. Then when somebody with money asked the police about it, suddenly it's credible and worth doing DNA testing on.
Was there something about being "Keirans" that he needed to run from? And if so why not take out loans/etc in his real name if he was busy taking over Woods' identity? Was Keirans paying back the loans in Woods' name since he had taken over that identity?
I guess it could all have had a legitimate reason, to him at least, at the start and it just all spiraled out of control and seemed impossible to walk back after a while but this article provokes more questions than it answers.
Also the "Sysadmin" angle is completely irrelevant, as is the amount he made over 10 years (what a stupid thing to express total compensation over 10 years as 1 number, it's clearly only for shock value).