A Michigan man pleaded guilty to hacking the human resources databases of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and stealing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of more than 65,000 UPMC employees. Justin Sean Johnson, aka TheDearthStar and Dearthy Star on the dark web, 30, of Detroit, Michigan, pleaded guilty to Counts 1 and 39 of a 43-count Indictment. In connection with the guilty plea, the court was advised that Johnson, known on the dark web as TheDearthStar and Dearthy Star, infiltrated and hacked into the UPMC human resource server databases in 2013 and 2014 and stole sensitive PII and W-2 information belonging to tens of thousands of UPMC employees. The information was sold by Johnson on dark web forums for use by conspirators, who promptly filed hundreds of false 1040 tax returns in 2014 using UPMC employee PII. These false 1040 filings claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars of false tax refunds, which they converted into Amazon.com gift cards, which were then used to purchase Amazon merchandise which was shipped to Venezuela.
