Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former co-worker
- Reference: 1712161809
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/04/03/sysadmin_33_year_id_theft/
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According to court documents, Matthew David Keirans, 58, also maliciously worked with authorities, supplying them with forged documents that would ultimately see his victim jailed and admitted to a mental hospital for nearly a year and a half.
Keirans first met his victim, William Donald Woods, who ran away from home at 16, in "about 1988" – which is as specific as the court documents get – while working at a hot dog stand in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Roughly two years later in 1990, Keirans is said to have assumed Woods' identity "in every aspect of his life," purchasing all manner of forged documents, including a Kentucky birth certificate, social security number, and I-9 form, all of which he later used to secure employment at an Iowa hospital in 2013 as a remote sysadmin.
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After passing the hospital's background checks, he became a core member of the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics' IT team and assumed a key role in maintaining the hospital's systems and infrastructure, according to Keirans' [4]plea agreement [PDF].
Over his ten-year employment, he earned more than $700,000 from his job and was earning more than $100,000 by the time he was nabbed by authorities.
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What happened with the real Woods between the late 1980s and the 2010s wasn't detailed in the court documents, but we know Keirans secured a job at an unnamed fast food chain in 1990 after he got his hands on a fake Colorado ID card. He also opened a Colorado bank account using Woods' name and the newfound ID card.
A year later, Keirans bought a car for $600 using two $300 checks, which later bounced, drove it a little while until it broke down, and then abandoned it. After, he went to an ATM to withdraw all the money he had left, then fled Colorado before an arrest warrant for William Woods was issued in the state.
In about 1994, Keirans, still using Woods' name, married a woman and had a child who also bore Woods' name.
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Between August 2016 and May 2022, Keirans took out eight different loans from credit unions in Woods' name, amounting to more than $200,000 in value, the court documents reveal.
Keirans clearly loved a good Jeep so he bought three of them using loans taken out in Woods' name – a 2016 Cherokee, a 2019 Cherokee, before ending up in the big leagues with a 2018 Grand Cherokee.
The fraudster was also approved for a Visa Platinum credit card with a limit of $11,000, in addition to numerous other personal loans, some of which used his Jeep as collateral.
Cruelty and incompetence in equal measure
If the awfulness wasn't evident already here, the true malice behind Keirans' actions became clear in 2019 when then-homeless Woods discovered the huge debt taken in his name, which amounted to around $130,000 at the time, and went to his local Los Angeles bank to clear things up.
Trying to explain that the lines of credit weren't taken out by the genuine Woods, he requested his account to be closed, saying he refused to pay the debt.
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Given the large sums in the account, the real Woods was asked a series of security questions, which of course he failed to answer correctly because he didn't create them. That prompted the bank teller dealing with Woods to alert the LAPD, which arrested Woods after Keirans faxed a series of forged documents to local police, "proving" he was the real Woods.
This is all despite the real Woods presenting a genuine social security card and California state ID card. To cap it off, Woods was arrested not under his own name, but under Keirans' instead.
The worst part – Woods was held in county jail for 428 days in total, and after a California judge deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial and Woods pleaded "no contest" to the two felony charges against him, he was sent to a mental hospital for a total of 147 days and medicated with psychotropic drugs. From then on, the judge also ordered Woods to only use his "true name," Matthew Keirans, going forward.
Throughout this ordeal, Keirans, earning a healthy salary through his work-from-Wisconsin-home [11]sysadmin gig, was in regular contact with authorities requesting updates to Woods' criminal case.
In numerous messages sent between him and the authorities, Keirans was seen to be going along with the realities of the case, and at the time Woods' mental fitness was questioned, he implied there was a possibility that Woods may regain that fitness.
Woods was released from both hospital and jail in 2021, was again homeless, and spent more than two years filing various reports to convince any authority that would listen that he was, in fact, the victim of identity fraud.
His luck turned on January 13, 2023 when, after discovering where Keirans worked, he informed the Iowa hospital about the situation, which then engaged a senior detective in the local police force.
That detective managed to unravel Keirans' 33-year scheme over the course of several months, in part using [12]DNA tests to definitively prove Keirans wasn't the son of an elderly man in Kentucky as he had previously claimed.
During a series of interviews with the detective, Keirans initially continued to falsely present as Woods until the DNA evidence was presented to him, at which point he said "my life is over" and "everything is gone."
Keirans now faces a potential maximum sentence of 32 years in prison, with a minimum of two years. He'll also have to pay a $1.25 million fine, and serve five years of supervised release after his sentence. ®
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[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/04/03/usa_v_keirans_plea_memorandum.pdf
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[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/the_death_of_the_sysadmin/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/dna_testing_company_ftc_complaint/
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I would think & hope there are a number of agencies Mr Woods should be taking action against, beyond Keirans.
The banks, the police departments, courts & hospitals for starters.
I'm sure there will likely be some kind of lawsuit against California for false imprisonment or some such. The bank was doing exactly what we want them to do if someone walks in claiming to be someone and can't adequately prove it: call the cops. If I walked into a bank pretending to be you, I'm sure you'd want the bank to call the cops to come arrest me.
The one kind of wrinkle in a lot of this, is the scammer got married and had a kid, otherwise I'd say that any monies he earned using the fake name should be clawed back and given over to the victim, but I'm at least assuming the wife and child were unaware of what was going on, so punishing them (more than they already have been just by being associated with the guy) seems a bit unfair. The wife can divorce him and start using her maiden name again, but the kid can't just cut out half of their genetics.
> but the kid can't just cut out half of their genetics.
It wouldn't be the first.
In the circumstances I'd have hoped that someone would latch onto this being a bit different from the normal run of things and needed a bit more investigation before the Iowan bank. At least kudos to them being on the alert.
Assuming he could have performed the Sysadmin gig under his own name it sounds like the only reason for this is just plain nastiness. He deserves to serve every one of those 32 years and whatever he has should go to compensating the victim rather than paying a fine. It sounds as if all those other places that didn't investigate properly should also owe Woods.
Yes, I'm a little confused as to motives. The real Mr K did obtain money and cars through this deception. Perhaps it sort of started small and then became harder and harder to stop if you see what I mean.
Perhaps it sort of started small and then became harder and harder to stop
I would think once he met someone he wanted to marry under the assumed name he was kind of forced to go all-in as "Woods" at that point. Be kind of hard to get her to marry you if you say "oh, the name I told you when we met, I was lying".
One can only hope the credit score for the real Woods will be wiped clean, though something tells me it won't. That fine should also go to the victim in this case. A million dollars would be enough for just about anyone to turn their life around, but if you're homeless it'd be enough to buy a modest house* or get an apartment so you have a stable address, a car to get to/from work with, and a wardrobe for interviews, with quite a bit left over.
Also, out of random curiosity, for all those who don't believe in divorce for religious reasons... if you marry someone who is using an assumed identity, does it still count? You agreed to marry someone named "Woods" not "Keirans" so are the vows still considered valid?
* Assuming you're not buying it in a place like California
Regarding marrying under a false name, pretty sure that’s illegal just about everywhere. More jail time …..
Which maked the child a basterd along with the father.
I'm going to think there's a certain irony between that last post & posters name.
Why did he do it ?
The write up does not give a clue.
Re: Why did he do it ?
Probably because no one but the scammer knows, and the scammer isn't saying.
Re: Why did he do it ?
The answer is the usual answer .....
because he could !!!
Cruel and nasty for the fun of it !!!
Hope he does serve those 32 years in full in the worse jail possible.
Something seriously wrong with USA .... this and the recent monkey torture story :(
Re: Why did he do it ?
"Something seriously wrong with USA .... this and the recent monkey torture story :("
Why is a country being blamed for a single criminal? Maybe, if I'm being generous, you could say that there is something wrong with the California police system which failed to unravel the crime*, but that wouldn't be the whole country either.
* Not knowing many details, I'm inclined not to blame them too much. With an identity theft going on for three decades, including lots of documentation, it would be hard to prove who is correct from documentation alone. If one person has a full set of documentation for an identity and another one has a partial set, one of them has clearly stolen the set. Governments are likely to believe the one with the full set who has been working under that identity for seven years at the time because that is not typical for an identity thief. This may be a reason to treat all identity theft cases with more scrutiny, maybe getting DNA testing involved in all cases of identity confusion, but that has its own potential downsides.
Re: Why did he do it ?
From the writeup, the police generally did everything you might consider reasonable. The scammer had a lot of fake documents to "prove" he was the "real" Woods, and sadly there's a confluence of 1) there generally being far more important things for cops to spend their time on, and 2) a lot of people becoming cops because they want the authority, not because they have any desire to actually help people.
Re: Why did he do it ?
The first bit appears to be the typical identity theft playbook: steal someone's identity, earn some money on that identity to establish a history, borrow money, don't pay it back, if questioned, tell them it's not you. The normal method is that, once you've stolen money that way, you burn that identity and either stop committing crimes or go get another one. I'm not really sure why he kept doing things under the second identity. My only theory, and one I haven't researched, is that he may have polluted his own identity, for example getting arrested, at some point and used this as a backup.
Re: Why did he do it ?
The story claims he's a sysadmin and he's learned the first rule: if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Presumably that's as far as he got.
Was Room 101 overbooked?
Woods was held in county jail for 428 days in total, and after a California judge deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial and Woods pleaded "no contest" to the two felony charges against him, he was sent to a mental hospital for a total of 147 days and medicated with psychotropic drugs. From then on, the judge also ordered Woods to only use his "true name," Matthew Keirans, going forward.
“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved being named Matthew Keirans.”
geniuses everywhere you look
So some guy named Woods owes the bank $130,000. Some guy claiming to be Woods shows up to say "that's me, but I don't owe you the money". Later, some guy in Iowa says, "no no I am Woods, I can prove it, his name is Keiran". And, and, ... At what point does the bank go after the guy in Iowa for their $130,000 ??? The whole reason a guy walked into a bank was over the debt.
And the police has some detectives! When was the last time an identity thief walked into a bank to "explain" things? Cuff him! The mind boggles. For crying out loud, identity thieves go after the deposits, not the debts. The California Woods just _had_ to be innocent. Only an innocent man would do what he had done.
For the record, if I walked into a bank and said "My name is yetanotheraoc like it says on my cards" and their response was "we don't believe you", I would be in Mission Impossible mode quicker than you could say conspiracy theory.
Re: geniuses everywhere you look
Not that it excuses it, but it would be a real breach of security for a bank to trust someone off the street claiming to be an account owner just because scammers “don’t want to go after debt.”
For example: “Hi, I am the real yetanotheraoc. I have a mortgage with you for $300,000. Some scammer has stolen my account. Please restore my access. Since I also bank with you and autopay from my savings account, please be sure you sign over all accounts in my name.”
Re: geniuses everywhere you look
The real kicker is that the victim held a genuine piece of ID & the perp was faxing across (poor quality photocopied?) documentation, that tactic didn't work out so well for Jerry Lundegaard 23 years earlier in fiction.
The victim clearly had a good idea of who was using his ID & to be forced by the courts to use it is just insult to injury.
In this day & age of sending emails, surely the cop in charge of the investigation might have asked for actual scans, I can only assume that they hadn't seen Fargo.
"Keirans now faces a potential maximum sentence of 32 years in prison, with a minimum of two years. He'll also have to pay a $1.25 million fine, and serve five years of supervised release after his sentence."
I would hope Keirans also owes the real Mr. Woods a HUGE restitution payment!