Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comments from county officials that make it clearer the data breach linked to this criminal case was separate from another data breach reported last fall.
A Raytown, Mo., man who was sentenced Wednesday as part of a methamphetamine ring also was responsible for stealing the identities of current and former Johnson County employees, a federal court has ruled.
Johnson County officials say their identities were not stolen as the result of a widely-reported case involving the Konnech election software last fall. Instead the employees appear to have been victims of a 2015 breach involving a misplaced or lost list of personal information in the county corrections department.
Michael B. Becher, 41, was sentenced on two unrelated criminal cases before U.S. District Judge Greg Kays in the federal court for the Western District of Missouri.
The bigger charge was for a $10 million conspiracy to distribute about 1,000 kilograms of meth. Becher will serve 20 years in federal prison without parole for that.
In the second case, Becher pleaded guilty to a scheme to use Johnson County employees’ identities to commit credit card fraud.
Becher made purchases with stolen identities
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri, Becher and accomplices first ran credit checks on the employees whose information they had obtained. If it looked like there was a good chance of creating a credit account under those names, they then made fake driver’s licenses and used them to open credit card accounts.
Prosecutors said Becher made at least seven fraudulent credit card purchases himself with the stolen identities of three victims. He made purchases in 2019 at Lowe’s and Home Depot ranging from $1,617 to $8,049. The goods were sold at half of their actual value, with Becher keeping half the proceeds and giving the rest to co-conspirators, the prosecutor’s office said.
The U.S. Attorney’s office mentioned the county data breach in a press release about the case, but did not give specifics about where the identities came from.
County says this is not linked to Konnech software
Although the Konnech Poll Chief system caused concerns for county officials last fall amid an investigation on whether personal information was exposed to third parties in another country, Johnson County officials say they are sure the identities that were stolen were not a result of that.
For one thing, the county did not start using Konnech products until 2016, said Assistant County Manager Joe Waters.
Instead, Waters referenced an identity breach from the year before that may not have been reported to the general public.
Few specifics were available Friday morning, but Waters said county officials learned after the fact that a document, possibly containing a list of employee’s personal information, had been mishandled in some way.
The number of employees potentially exposed was small, he said, and all were notified. The breach did not involve electronic equipment, he said.
Poll worker data was exposed in a separate incident last year
That contrasts with the software data exposure involving Konnech and the company’s CEO that made national news last October.
At that time, Johnson County officials were concerned about personal data exposure of election employees here. At the time, the county announced 1,319 election workers would be notified that their data may have been compromised.
However Waters said he was unaware of any criminal complaints that might have resulted from that.
Shortly after learning of the Konnech concerns, the county moved data from that system onto its own isolated servers.
The investigation into Konnech and its CEO, Eugene Yu, was later dropped.
Becher was also involved in larger crime ring
Becher was ordered to pay $189,378 in restitution to victims of the credit card fraud.
The five-year sentence he received for that charge will run concurrently with the 20-year stint in prison for the drug-trafficking charge.
Becher had pleaded guilty last April to drug trafficking from 2018-2019 in an organization led by Mirza Alihodzic of Kansas City, Mo. He admitted to distributing at least 185 kilograms of meth and buying multiple pounds of it on a daily basis, prosecutors said.
He was arrested in November, 2019 after meeting up with a co-conspirator, according to the district attorney. Officers found meth in his car and weapons inside a storage unit that included M20 Super Bazooka rockets, a semi-automatic rifle and ammunition.
Becher was one of 12 defendants in the meth case, six of whom have pleaded guilty and await sentencing.
Roxie Hammill is a freelance journalist who reports frequently for the Post and other Kansas City area publications. You can reach her at roxieham@gmail.com.
