After the Laval police arrests on Wednesday, the Sûreté du Québec must announce arrests on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. as part of the Portier project on data theft at Desjardins. According to our information, investigators handcuffed the number one suspect in the case, ex-employee Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval.
“There are several people who are currently detained,” says Benoît Richard, spokesperson for the SQ. However, certain individuals of interest are outside the country and are unlikely to be arrested on Thursday.
According to what La Presse has learned, the SQ is in full operation to arrest the people targeted in this investigation, which has been going on for five years.
The police would also target a network of mortgage and insurance brokers who would have recovered part of the stolen information, according to what has leaked so far from the five-year investigation into the leak.
According to what police documents filed in court have allowed us to learn so far, Sébastien Boulanger-Dorval would have sold the stolen information to Jean-Loup Leullier-Masse, a private lender in Montmagny. Its offices were also raided by the Laval police in June 2019.
Portier had not led to any arrests until today, but several disciplinary decisions in recent years have confirmed that brokers in the capital then recovered part of the data.
This is the case of Mathieu Joncas, a mortgage broker sentenced in 2022 to fines totaling $36,000 and 420 days of suspension for his role. The businessman, who is also a private lender, admitted to having acquired information on “150,000 to 200,000” Desjardins clients before the disciplinary committee of the Organisme d’autoréglementation du courtageimmobilier du Québec (OACIQ) .
His partner and insurance broker, François Baillargeon-Bouchard, was fined a total of $40,000 for the repurchase of data on 40,000 clients and the obstruction of an investigation by the Financial Markets Authority.
Another broker, Marc-Olivier Tanguay, who collaborated in the brokers’ watchdog’s investigation into Joncas, was fined $5,000 in July 2020 for acquiring confidential data on 5,000 clients of Gardens.
On Wednesday, the Laval police announced the arrest of three people in connection with fraud carried out by AccèsD using information from data theft, as part of its Glaive project at the origin of the main investigation of the SQ.
These first major developments come almost five years after the announcement of a massive data theft at Desjardins on June 20, 2019.
The Movement initially announced that it had data on 2.9 million customers stolen. He then revised this figure upwards several times. In December 2020, privacy commissions concluded that the theft potentially affected 9.7 million individuals and businesses.
– More details to come