More than five years after massive leaks of personal information at Desjardins, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) announced Thursday the arrest of the main suspect in the case, 42-year-old Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval, who worked in the cooperative’s marketing department until 2019.
Three other suspects were arrested, the SQ announced on Thursday: Jean-Loup Masse-Leullier, 32, François Baillargeon-Bouchard, 35, and Laurence Bernier, 29.
They face charges including fraud, identity theft and trafficking in identity information.
The arrests are part of the Portier investigation related to the “theft and resale of personal information of Desjardins Group’s 9.7 million members and customers.”
“Initiated in June 2019, Project Portier aimed to track down individuals who stole, used and distributed lists of nominative data for fraudulent purposes,” reads the SQ press release.
Arrest warrants have been issued against four suspects who have not yet been located. On Wednesday, the Service de police de Laval (SPL) announced the arrest of three other suspects also linked to the data theft.
Two damning reports
In December 2020, two damning reports about the data leak that affected more than 9.7 million people in Canada and abroad in 2019, including nearly seven million Quebecers, concluded that Desjardins had failed to meet several of its obligations under the Act Respecting the Protection of Personal Information in the Private Sector.
The report by the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec noted that the cooperative had “failed in its obligation to limit access to personal information, particularly that stored in shared directories.”
The leaker, Boulanger-Dorval, worked on the marketing team at Desjardins head office and had access to personal information that his database access rights did not allow him to obtain, the commission noted in its report.
Contrary to directives, this confidential information was stored in directories shared by all marketing team employees.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on June 13, 2024.