A North Carolina man named Troy Murray, 57, was sentenced to more than 10 years in federal prison for selling the personal data of over 7 million elderly Americans to scammers in Jamaica — who used it to defraud seniors out of their savings through fake lottery schemes.
Between 2016 and 2023, Murray compiled and sold “lead lists” — spreadsheets packed with names, phone numbers, home addresses, and email addresses of older Americans. He typically charged $500 per list of 100 to 300 names, and is estimated to have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars per year doing so. The buyers used these lists to make convincing phone calls telling victims they had won a lottery prize and needed to pay fees to claim it — fees that were simply stolen. Murray was ordered to forfeit over $5.2 million as part of his sentence.
This case is a reminder that data brokers — companies and individuals who collect and sell personal information — operate in a largely unregulated space, and that the information they sell can end up in the hands of scammers who specifically target older adults.