A Detroit, Michigan man pleaded guilty to hacking the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center human resource databases and stealing personal information of thousands of employees.
Of the 43 counts in the indictment against him, 30-year-old Justin Sean Johnson pleaded guilty to two of them.
Johnson was indicted in May of 2020, but the case was sealed until June of 2020.
Johnson, who is known as TheDearthStar and Dearthy Star on the dark web, hacked UPMC's human resource server databases in 2013 and 2014. He stole personally identifiable information and W-2 information of over 65,000 UPMC employees.
He sold the information on dark web forums, which the buyers then used to file false tax returns claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars. The money was then converted to Amazon gift cards and used to purchase items from amazon.com, which was shipped out of the country to Venezuela.
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Johnson also stole and sold personal information of an additional 90,000 people, non-UPMC employees, from 2014 through 2017. That information as used to commit identity theft and bank fraud.
Johnson's scheme totaled $1.7 million in false tax returns.
He is facing a fine of $250,000 for conspiracy to defraud the United States, two years in prison and $250,000 for each count of aggravated identify theft.