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Port of Tampa employees victimized by ID thief

By Steve Huettel, Times Staff Writer
Published April 13, 2007

A contractor's employee took personal information on thousands of people with Port of Tampa access badges and applied for credit cards in the names of about 20 of them, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Daniel E. Glenn, 29, was arrested near his Lakeland home Thursday and charged with an offense against intellectual property to defraud/obtain property.

A computer technician for Siemens Building Technologies, Glenn was working on a computer upgrade at the Tampa Port Authority on Feb. 28.

He told port authority employees he needed access to the security badge database to fix corrupted data, according to an arrest report. The agency has issued 39,000 badges for longshoremen, truckers and workers at port businesses to enter secure areas along the waterfront.

"He copied thousands of names but only acted on only a very small number," said Mark Dubina, a supervisor with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) in Tampa. "He basically copied the database."

FDLE agents and local police recovered the copied data from Glenn's home Thursday, wrote port director Richard Wainio in a memo to agency employees.

Glenn used stolen data from about 20 people to make applications to at least four different credit card companies over the Internet, the FDLE said.

Investigators don't believe he got any cash or merchandise with cards issued in their names. Most of the victims are port authority personnel. They included a port authority governing board member and two managers, said Wainio, who declined to identify them.

Glenn was suspended with pay from Siemens Building Technologies, a subsidiary of German conglomerate Siemens AG, said spokesman Steve Kuehn. The company is investigating the allegations.

"In any instance like this, we take the issue very seriously," he said. "We want to assure customers of the integrity of our service and our relationship."

About 10 days ago, several port authority employees reported receiving calls from companies about credit card applications they'd never filled out, said Wainio. They asked if the port's computers had been hacked into.

Officials told the FDLE about the earlier computer work by Siemens and identified Glenn as the technician.

Investigators notified the three consumer credit agencies. They monitored Glenn's home mail and found correspondence from financial services companies addressed to people in the port database, according to the arrest warrant.

[Last modified April 12, 2007, 22:41:23]