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Verizon techie sold people's call logs at $75 a head to private dick

Prison looms for telco insider who flogged subscriber records to dodgy investigator

A former Verizon Wireless employee is facing time behind bars after he pled guilty to selling customer records.

Daniel E Traeger copped to one charge of unauthorized access to a protected computer, admitting that from September of 2011 to January of 2014 he accessed and sold customer mobile records, including phone location and call logs, to a private investigator.

The plea deal [PDF], filed with the US District Court in Northern Alabama, describes how Traeger, working as a network technician at the time, used Verizon's monitoring and tracking software to pull customer locations and call records without permission or clearance. He then sold that data to the unnamed, unauthorized private dick.

In exchange, Traeger said he received $50 per month in exchange for data on one or two customers per month, and more than $10,000 in total from the glum shoe.

At its peak, the partnership was netting Traeger roughly $750 per month and trafficking about 10 to 15 records at a time.

The filings do not name the private investigator or reveal how or whether the stolen records were then put to use.

Though the maximum sentence for unauthorized access is a five-year prison term, Traeger is likely to get a more lenient punishment thanks to his willingness to cooperate with the feds in their investigation.

US attorneys have recommended to the court that the sentence be "at the low end" of the prescribed guidelines. Traeger also looks to face a fine and a term of supervised release in addition to his time behind bars.

Traeger is hardly alone in trying to make a buck on customer records. Similar cases of workers leaking subscriber info have been uncovered at AT&T and T-Mobile, and a 2015 poll found that up to a third of UK workers would be willing to sell out corporate and customer info if the price was right. ®

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