Slashdot Mirror
Chase Data for 2.6 Million Ends up in Landfill
svonkie writes to mention a ComputerWorld story about some bad news from some 2.6 Million Chase credit card customers. These folks are being told that tape backups with their information were mistakenly thrown away back in July. There's apparently no need to worry about possibility of compromised personal information; the company believes the tapes were destroyed at a landfill. Just the same, "To prevent similar incidents, Chase said it is strengthening its security procedures and is conducting a review of all data storage and protection processes. Chase began notifying the affected customers about the incident yesterday and said the process is expected to take two to three weeks. The company is offering one year of free credit monitoring to people whose Social Security numbers were on the tapes."
The article summary posted above fails to mention that these were Circuit City credit customers. That is a very important bit of info as many retail credit card holders often have no idea who the issuing bank is.
As i recall you're allowed 1 free credit report a year every year anyway. Wasn't there a piece of legislation passed that said that?
There's a news summary on their main web page:
Circuit City Customers
Chase is notifying a segment of Circuit City credit card account holders that computer tapes containing their personal information were mistakenly discarded.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It is, but the key is written on the outside of the tapes. Apparently it's some sort of poor-man's DRM.
http://outcampaign.org/
The FTC website gives good explanation of how you can get a free credit report. You can get one per year for free (as parent mentioned), but you can also get them in other situations, such as if you are the victim of identity theft, or if you are unemployed, etc.. They lay out a few examples of how you can get one in the linked document.
Someone got an expired credit card number of mine and did some damage on eBay, lucky only for about $200. It still took me approximately 30 hours of my time just to clear the shit up with AOL, eBay, PayPal, and the collection agency that originally contact me. I also filed a local police report, contacted the FTC, and Equifax. By law one of the major credit agencies has to provide you with a free credit report in those situations. I'm not sure if anything can be done if your information was just "lost", rather than "stolen", but you are atleast guaranteed the free credit report each year regardless.
I used to work at a Chase subsidiary, and no amount of IT incompetence from them surprises me. Frankly I'm shocked we were never sued into the ground with the idiotic things they did; for example, sending out tax forms for RV loans late, resulting in customers losing tax refund money; also (it was a "loan servicer") we'd call people 3x or more/day after they'd already spoken to us.
The corporate intranet webshite had a form that all employees had to agree to yearly. My section all did theirs after I did, and each time they logged in *on different machines and with different accounts* the form thought they were me.
I know I could name many more things, but it's been a couple years and I've successfully blocked out most of those memories.
Ahh... you mean like:
+ million+accounts/2100-1029_3-5751886.html
CardSystems in Tucson, who lost 40 million Visa and Mastercard account records. CardSystems is one of several companies that process transactions for banks and merchants.
http://news.com.com/Credit+card+breach+exposes+40
Er, parent post isn't offtopic. He's referring to the firefly episode "Trash", wherein a heist is pulled off by dumping a valuable object in the trash to avoid it setting off alarms on the way out. The valuable item is then retrieved from the trash bin before it makes it to the dump.
You are able to find out what data is stored. You are entitled to a free annual copy of your credit report from each of the 3 reporting agencies. Further, you are allowed to request they fix incorrect information. If they don't comply and fix incorrect data, there is also a law (which I'm not fully familiar with) which allows you to sue them for it. A couple of the credit-related forums have regular reports of people suing creditors and credit reporting agencies for failure to fix incorrect information and walking away with easy cash for it.