From Part 1 of the article: > “He was selling the personal information on more than 200 million Americans and allowing anyone to buy it for pennies apiece.” I

From Part 1 of the article: > “He was selling the personal information on more than 200 million Americans and allowing anyone to buy it for pennies apiece.” If 1% of those is used to commit $500 in credit card fraud that's $1B in hard losses without considering the cost to those 2M people cleaning up the mess. It sounds like $1.1B is on the absolute low end.