Three examples of illegal sale of consumer information
Friday, March 6th, 2009Three recent examples of the illegal sale of consumers’ personal and financial information illustrate the need for LifeLock identity theft protection.
Rental Research Services’ failure to screen customers requesting consumer information resulted in the sale of at least 318 credit reports to identity thieves, according to a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
RSS uses information from the credit reporting agencies to provide a screening service for landlords who want to vet prospective tenants. Unfortunately, they failed to maintain “reasonable procedures to prevent such impermissible disclosures and to verify their customers’ identities and how they intended to use the information,” according to the complaint.
The reports allegedly provided by RSS to the identity thieves contained names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, bank and credit card account numbers and credit histories.
A $500,000 judgment was brought against RSS, but suspended because the defendant claims they are unable to pay it.
ChoicePoint, another data aggregator, agreed to a $10 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit in January after admitting they sold more than 160,000 consumer reports to identity thieves, though neither the company nor its officers admit in wrongdoing.
“I think the point we wanted to make is we’re not a company going around willy-nilly selling data to anyone who wants it,” Choice Point’s information security vice president, Aurobindo Sundaram, said in a an interview with SCMagazineUS.com.
In Canada, the federal privacy commission is investigating Landlord Source Centre, a service that provides financial and background information on tenants, for posting a website with extensive tenants’ information, including mental health diagnoses, personal and identifying information about their children and details of previous landlord-tenant disputes.