Two Georgia men will serve time in prison after their identity theft operation took a turn for the bizarre, leading to their capture by authorities.
According to federal prosecutors, Durrell Tyler and DeShawn Johnson used darknet markets to purchase personal identifiable information (PII), using it to open lines of credit under the names of their victims. To accomplish this, they forwarded victim phone lines, mailing addresses, and emails to themselves. This allowed Tyler and Johnson to fully impersonate their victims without letting them catch on to the scam, which netted an estimated $130,000.
Most of the duo’s 75 victims were elderly, and many had been the target of identity theft before.
It was one particular purchase that Tyler made that caught the eye of federal investigators. Among the sets of data he bought from the dark web was the personal information of Ron and Dorothy Hess, an elderly Georgia couple that had been murdered in 2019. Adding to the intrigue is the report that the couple’s information was being used by Tyler “within days after being brutally killed.”
County Sheriffs in Barrow, Georgia – the home county of the Hess’ – have not named Tyler as a suspect in the double homicide, but also haven’t ruled his involvement out “in any case, shape or form.” The case of what happened to Hess’ remains unsolved but has sparked some deal of speculation among internet detectives over the last two years.
Tyler’s arrest stems from the actions of ‘Operation DisrupTOR,’ which is a “coordinated international effort to disrupt opioid trafficking on the darknet.” To date, DisrupTOR has led to 120 arrests and the seizure of 270+ kilograms of various drugs.
Tyler, who plead guilty to the charges in May, will serve 5 years and 10 months in prison, while Johnson will serve 3 years and 6 months. The investigation for the case was carried out by the US Postal Inspection Service and the US Secret Service.