A BRITISH immigrant who worked on a help-desk for a New York software firm has been jailed for 14 years for his part in the largest identity theft in American history.

Philip Cummings, 35, who now lives in Cartersville, Georgia, apologised to the court for downloading passwords and credit information and selling them for $30 (£16) each to a ring of Nigerian immigrants who used them to cheat about 30,000 people out of an estimated $50 million-$100 million. The federal district court in New York received statements from around 300 victims who had seen their bank accounts emptied and fake loans taken out by the Bronx-based gang.

“I’m very, very sorry for my conduct in this case,” Cummings said at the sentencing hearing on Tuesday. “I normally don’t get into this kind of trouble.”

Cummings, who emigrated to America when he was 15, originally faced up to 50 years in prison but agreed to a plea bargain last year on fraud and conspiracy charges.

Claiming he needs a heart transplant, he appealed for leniency. But the judge said the crime was too serious and ordered him to report to jail on March 9. Although a British citizen, he did not seek consular assistance.

District Court Judge George Daniels said the case emphasised how easy it was to wreak havoc on people’s financial and personal lives, and called the personal suffering of the victims “almost unimaginable”.

In 1999 and 2000, Cummings provided technical support on the help desk of Teledata Communications, a Long Island company that provides the software needed to run credit checks at America’s “big three” credit-history bureaux: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

His job allowed him access to passwords and codes that enabled him to download individual credit reports.

Cummings regularly met a friend called Linus Baptiste at Baptiste’s home in the New York suburbs. There they would use one of Baptiste’s five computers to download credit reports.

Baptiste, who has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, sold the credit reports to a ring of about 20 street criminals, composed mainly of Nigerian immigrants, who used the information to loot the bank accounts and credit cards of unsuspecting victims.

Entering his guilty plea in September, Cummings admitted that he recorded the information on to a laptop computer that he gave to Baptiste.

“I left the computer with him and when I asked what he was doing, he said he wasn’t doing it any more,” he told the judge. “I didn’t know the magnification.”

The first target was Ford Motor Credit Corp’s branch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which began receiving complaints from customers. Armed with confidential information from the credit reports, the gang had been able to drain bank accounts, open lines of credit and change customers’ addresses to receive duplicate credit cards.

The ring moved on to other companies across the country. An investigation was started when a clerk at a Washington Mutual Bank in Florida noticed that the branch had been billed for 1,100 credit reports it did not order.

Barbara Cusumano, the former head of an airline anti-fraud unit, told the court she “went crazy” writing to everybody after discovering that $1,500 had been illegally charged to her credit card by someone in Florida. Florida police told her they would not investigate because her loss was less than $5,000.

Her case was investigated only when authorities realised it was part of the larger scheme. “One of the messages this sends is that if you stay under the threshold, you can do what you want,” she said.