Oops.
The Vietnamese group practiced identity theft, gathered records (including social security numbers), and then sold this info to people willing to buy that personal info. Court Ventures didn't check into the legitimacy of the Vietnamese group before selling the info. In other words, Court Ventures collected a lot of personal information from consumers, sold that information to a client in Vietnam, and that client in turn sold it to its clients who are buying it presumably for nefarious purposes.
The term "identity theft" usually implies that someone's information or identification is being stolen. But what is it called when it's lawfully (if carelessly) sold to a person who shouldn't have it? It's called a data breach. Imagine having to tell over 200,000,000 people that although they entrusted you with their information on loan applications, credit checks, etc., you sold that information to what many would consider hackers. That leaves the CEO in a very bad situation, even if he put himself there.
Granted, this was not a situation that involved hacking. In my opinion, it's much worse. Hacking is when someone has made at least a minimal effort to secure information that shouldn't be seen, but someone has been able to access that information anyway. This is a situation where you have information that shouldn't be seen, but nobody has broken in. Instead, the kind of people you want your information are being sold that exact information that they shouldn't see. You not only weren't protected- your secret information was sold so that the company could profit, and they were so careless and greedy that they didn't care whether the information should be secret or not.
References:
McCandless, D. (2015, October 2). Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/
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