Justin Sean Johnson was sentenced October 15 to the statutory maximum sentence of 60 months’ incarceration for Conspiracy to Defraud the US, and the statutory maximum of 24 months for Aggravated Identity Theft, for a total of 84 months of incarceration, for 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. Chief United States District Judge Mark R, Hornak imposed the sentence on Johnson, aka TheDearthStar and Dearthy Star, age 30, formerly of Detroit, Michigan. 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. Johnson then sold the stolen information 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. Additionally, Johnson, from 2014 through 2017 stole and sold nearly 90,000 additional (non-UPMC) sets of PII to buyers on dark web forums, which could be used to commit identity theft and bank fraud.
