The PC Pro: News reports that a man stands accused of trying to create fake user accounts in order to accumulate money from “tiny” payments:

According to court documents, Californian Michael Largent used an automated script to open 58,000 such accounts, collecting many thousands of these small payments into a few personal bank accounts.

Largent also performed the same trick with Google’s Checkout service, cashing more than $8,000 alone from the service.

That is fairly common, in terms of fraud and new-user creation, but here is the newsworthy part.

When the bank asked Largent about the thousands of small transfers, he told them that he’d read Google’s terms of service, and that it didn’t prohibit multiple e-mail addresses and accounts. “He stated he needed the money to pay off debts and stated that this was one way to earn money, by setting up multiple accounts having Google submit the two small deposits.”

False data is at the heart of fraud, so I am not sure why he thought that generating false names and addresses would be considered kosher. Could he not have generated aliases for himself rather than completely fake names? Aside from this inconvenient fact that he created bogus data to intentionally mislead/misrepresent himself and get money from others for it, I find it interesting that the bank was suspicious of scripts that generate funds through accumulating small fees.

According to the government, Largent was undone by the USA Patriot Act’s requirement that financial firms verify the identity of their customers. Schwab.com was notified in January that more than 5,000 online accounts had been opened with bogus information. When the Secret Service investigated, they found some 11,385 Schwab accounts were opened under the name “Speed Apex” from the same five IP addresses, all of them tracing back to Largent’s internet service from AT&T.

So the USA Patriot Act is used to mop up for some financial firms with weak controls on their website. Who notified Schwab? You would think Schwab could detect 11,385 accounts under the same name, unless that really is not a violation of their terms and an individual is allowed to setup an unlimited number of accounts. But this just takes me back to the question of why Largent bothered with fake names instead of an alias or screen name, so to speak.