NYPD Auxiliary Officer Charged With Hacking Into 70th Precinct & FBI Databases To Scam Accident Victims: U.S. Attorney
An NYPD auxiliary officer assigned to the 70th Precinct was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with hacking into police and FBI databases to steal the personal information of traffic accident victims so he could bill those individuals for fraudulent work, authorities announced today.
The arrest of Yehuda Katz, 45, who a police spokesman said has been suspended from his longtime position as an auxiliary deputy inspector at the 70th Precinct, was announced by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch, FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office Diego Rodriguez, and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton.
“The defendant allegedly used his position as an auxiliary officer to hack into restricted computers and networks in order to obtain the personal information of thousands of citizens in a scheme to enrich himself through fraud,” Lynch said in a press release. “The threat posed by those who abuse positions of trust to engage in insider attacks is serious, and we will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to vigorously prosecute such attacks.”
According to the criminal complaint, Katz, who worked at the 70th Precinct for more than 15 years, allegedly secretly installed multiple electronic devices in the 70th Precinct’s Traffic Safety Office that allowed him to remotely access restricted police computers and law enforcement databases, including one maintained by the FBI, that he did not have permission to access. One of the devices allegedly installed by the defendant contained a hidden camera that captured a live image of the Traffic Safety Office and was capable of live-streaming that image over the internet, prosecutors said. The second electronic device was allegedly connected to one of the computers in the Traffic Safety Office and allowed the computer to be accessed and controlled remotely, the complaint charges.
The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau and the FBI launched their investigation into Katz in August and discovered he allegedly ran searches on about 6,440 license plates involved in city traffic accidents between May and August 2014, according to officials. Using information from victims’ files, Katz allegedly contacted them and falsely claimed to be an attorney with the fictitious “Katz and Katz law firm,” among other fake firms, the complaint said.
“This type of behavior betrays the public’s trust and cannot be tolerated,” Rodriguez said in a press release. “We entrust our public servants to safeguard confidential information and not prey upon victims, and we will continue to work with our partners to prosecute those who engage in this type of criminal activity.”
Katz’s public defender, Kannan Sundaram, did not respond to a request for comment.