This is an awful story, and the headline doesn't say the worst part.

But looks like a sysadmin's access wasn't involved in the identity theft, despite what mention in the headline might suggest.

The only sysadmin angle I see on this story is that the identity theft might've (unclear) eventually permitted the perpetrator to pass pre-employment checks to get get some kind of remote sysadmin job at a hospital.

So I guess the relevance to IT (given this is The Register) is that your sysadmin (or DevOps(R) or whatever) people might not be who you they claim to be, in some freak situation of a person who'd get the victim jailed and then committed to a mental asylum...

What I cannot figure out from this bizarre story was what was even the motivation? Did he just have an early run in with this guy, identified him as a target, maybe had a grudge and then just... stole his identity for 30 years? To do what? Why not get a job under his real name? Why force this guy to assume your ACTUAL name? It's utterly bizarre and one of the weirdest sociopathic things I've heard of in a while.

It's very likely he wouldn't be able to pass a background check himself, so he stole the identity to secure a well-paid job that he couldn't get himself

That's the worst part? Just some confusion that "sysadmin" wasn't relevant to the case?

Not the fact that the real Woods was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital and forced to take medication, simply for asserting he was who he actually was?

Not that somehow our justice system thinks "lying to a bank" should be worth 30 years in prison, but stealing someone's identity gives you a mere two years?

C'mon.

I just don't understand the motivation at all, though maybe that's kind of the point, as in that there isn't one.

Was there something about being "Keirans" that he needed to run from? And if so why not take out loans/etc in his real name if he was busy taking over Woods' identity? Was Keirans paying back the loans in Woods' name since he had taken over that identity?

I guess it could all have had a legitimate reason, to him at least, at the start and it just all spiraled out of control and seemed impossible to walk back after a while but this article provokes more questions than it answers.

Also the "Sysadmin" angle is completely irrelevant, as is the amount he made over 10 years (what a stupid thing to express total compensation over 10 years as 1 number, it's clearly only for shock value).

> Woods was held in county jail for 428 days in total, and after a California judge deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial

America's legal system at work. Now a judge can diagnose mental health conditions!

That's not how that works. In California, he would need to be found guilty and only then would there be a trial about whether he was mentally well. It's also not about whether he has a mental health issue, but about whether he was capable of forming criminal intent and thus being held responsible.

The shitty part of this isn't that the judges have that ability, there's a time and a place for that.

The bad part is that the system thought so little of him because he was poor and homeless that he couldn't convince them of his identity, despite having a social security card and a state ID from the state he was being prosecuted in. Everyone just assumed that the guy with the money was the "real" guy, because why would he impersonate a homeless person? I don't think Woods ever could have won, no amount of documentation would have convinced everyone.

It's awful that the people that finally believed him were a hospital. Then when somebody with money asked the police about it, suddenly it's credible and worth doing DNA testing on.

The punishment should be: everything the perpetrator built, earned and bought gets given to the victim. Oh and prison. The perpetrator gets prison too. Could you imagine getting arrested for reporting identity theft? Getting charged and incarcerated for it? Madness.

Reminds me of this song from an other era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhd9fmOdCs

Wow. That's as bad as sysadmin misbehavior gets. That poor man! I can't imagine getting jailed and left to rot for someone else's crimes. I feel bad when I catch myself watching client filenames scroll by in rsync.

His role as a sysadmin seems completely unrelated to this crime though?

It might be a reason he was caught: the reason the hospital got a detective to investigate him was probably because it was worried he might engage in ransomware or other security breaches against the hospital.

Wasn’t sysadmin related.