OREGON ACCOUNTING OFFICE COMPUTER THEFT SUSPECT CAUGHTThe Herald Journal: Local News
Burglary suspect arrested in Oregon

By Tyler Riggs
A suspect in the March 2004 burglary of a Providence accounting office recently was extradited to Utah, after being arrested by Oregon law enforcement officials.

The 45-year-old Kaysville man is being held by Davis County officials while an investigation by the Utah Attorney General’s office is conducted. While the man hasn’t been officially charged for any incidents in Cache County yet, he is believed to be involved with burglaries from Logan to St. George.

In March 2004, three computer hard drives, containing bank account numbers, Social Security information and other private data about thousands of clients, were stolen from the public accounting offices of Saunders and Wangsgard.

On the same night, five Logan dentists’ offices were broken into. While police officials didn’t believe the incidents were related at the time, they now have information to believe the Kaysville man was involved in all six March 2004 incidents in Cache County, and may have been involved in more.

Cache County Sheriff’s Office Detective Douglas Thorson said Wednesday that the Kaysville man has admitted to burglaries throughout Utah and Wyoming, and keeps acknowledging involvement in other incidents. The man’s identity is being withheld pending formal charging by the Attorney General’s office.

After the three computer hard drives containing personal information were stolen in the 2004 incident, there were concerns the suspect may have used the information for personal gain. That wasn’t the case, Thorson said, as the Kaysville man reportedly erased all information from the hard drives and resold them as parts for computers at a business he owned.

“He destroyed any information on those hard drives and reset them so they’d appear new,” Thorson said. “They were just a blank hard drive and he put them in the computers and sold them through his store. He never even looked at them, he just wiped them and was done with them.”

Jeff Wangsgard, owner of Saunders and Wangsgard, confirmed he’d heard of no incidents involving his customers’ personal information being stolen. As a result of the burglary, Wangsgard said, his firm upgraded its security protocols, encrypted all information on its computers and added new security to the building.

The Attorney General’s office will continue its investigation of the Kaysville man in the coming weeks, and has said it will release information about all crimes the man is accused of involvement with when the investigation is complete.