A former JPMorgan Chase & Co. employee has been arrested by the FBI on charges of stealing customer data and trying to sell it to an undercover informant for tens of thousands of dollars.
Peter Persaud, who appeared this week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Viktor Pohorelsky in Brooklyn, is charged with one count of scheming to defraud a financial institution.
The insider gained unauthorized access to customer accounts and later sold the data, including PINs, Social Security numbers and birth dates, as well as debit and bank account security codes, to an informant posing as a cyber-thief.
Court records detail a classic sting operation, where the undercover G-man met with Persauld multiple times over the course of several months to gain his trust and information. The two “conspired” to take the information that Persauld stole, drain the accounts, and split the money. In one case, Persauld was paid about $2,500 for one set of bank account credentials, for an account that contained about $19,000 total. Persaud asked for $7,500 more, to be paid once the account was drained.
He was suspended by the bank in February, after which he complained about not having access to the confidential banking data anymore.
“I can’t get nothing while I’m suspended. ’Cause I don’t have access to that,” Persaud told the undercover agent, according to Bloomberg.
Once he went back to work in March, prosecutors said that he attempted to sell account information for four more bank accounts that combined contained about $150,000.
JPMorgan, which was hit by hackers in a massive breach revealed last fall, has been trying to talk up its cyber bona fides. “We will not compromise on the control environment and, to that end, continue to tighten data controls for ourselves, as well as for our third parties,” COO Matt Zames wrote in a letter to shareholders.