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ChoicePoint Fined $15M for Identity Thefts

Posted By Jim On 01/26/2006 @ 6:46 pm In Credit,Government,Personal Finance | 3 Comments

ChoicePoint Inc. is one the largest data aggregators of personal identity information and last year it admitted to releasing/selling data on approximately 163,000 records to fake debt collection, insurance and check-cashing companies created solely to steal the information. While an accident is an accident, ChoicePoint failed to adequately check these fraudulent businesses before sending over the information. Today, they agreed to pay out approximately $15 million. Of that, $10M is in the form of a civil penalty and the remaining $5M will be used to compensate consumers. Essentially it cost ChoicePoint $92.02 per record that they revealed.

At $92.02 each…

  • Ameriprise owes $21,164,600 after losing 230,000 records [3].
  • Lexis-Nexis needs to pony of a check of $28,526,200 for the 310,000 records it had compromised [4].
  • Bank of America owes a whopping $110,424,000 after losing 1.2M records of federal employees [5].
  • Citigroup and UPS have to figure out a way to split a $358,878,000 bill after a tape containing 3.9M records [6] from their CitiFinancial subsidiary dropped off the back of the UPS truck.

    • And finally, CardSystems Solutions you win the biggest prize for losing 40M records [7] with a final score of $3,680,800,000.

    Looks like ChoicePoint got off easy!

    If you’re interested, I have written a whole bunch of articles about identity theft [8].

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    [1] Tweet: http://twitter.com/share

    [2] Email: mailto:?subject=http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/choicepoint-fined-15m-for-identity-thefts.html

    [3] losing 230,000 records: http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/ameriprise-loses-data-for-230k.html

    [4] 310,000 records it had compromised: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7475594/

    [5] losing 1.2M records of federal employees: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7032779/

    [6] a tape containing 3.9M records: http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/06/news/fortune500/security_citigroup/

    [7] losing 40M records: http://news.com.com/Credit+card+breach+exposes+40+million+accounts/2100-1029_3-5751886.html

    [8] whole bunch of articles about identity theft: http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/index.php?s=identity+theft

    Thank you for reading!