Bank sends credit card statements to the wrong person
The potential impact of a financial data breach cannot be underestimated, as demonstrated in this case. Legal Director at Hayes Connor Christine Sabino reveals more.
But in many cases, its human error rather than cybercrime that is the biggest cause of financial data breaches. And, these errors are just as likely to happen offline.
In a recent case, our solicitors saw the impact of what can happen when a person's financial information was sent to the wrong address by mistake.
What happened in this case?
In this data breach, a bank sent partial credit card statements to the wrong person. The information was sent to a completely different person to the account holder (our client), attached to the back of a bundle of documents she had requested.
Luckily, in this instance the woman who received our client's statements was honest, and despite being a complete stranger she contacted him to let him know what had happened. She also reported the incident to her local branch, although she was not satisfied with how the bank proposed to deal with the matter. If such a simple error can be made, what's to say it couldn't happen to other customers?
As a direct response of this admin error, this data breach has caused considerable distress and worry to our client. He has now lost confidence in his bank and can't be sure if his sensitive and personal data has been further breached.
Lessons learned
Banks, credit card providers and other financial institutions need to do more to protect sensitive financial data.
All too often staff are involved in such data breaches, so employee training and awareness must form a core part of any security strategy and measures.
If you are an employee of a financial organisation and want to make sure that you don't make a similar mistake, talk to your employer about any processes that can be put in place to make sure that this doesn't happen to you. Such steps could include things like additional data protection training, secure systems for storing information, checks and balances on systems generating correspondence, and measures to ensure that the correct information is being sent to customers.
This is especially important if you deal with sensitive financial information which could cause serious harm if it falls into the wrong hands.
For more advice on how to keep your data safe, follow Hayes Connor on Twitter or give us a like on Facebook. Alternatively, if you have been the victim of a data breach or cyber fraud, find out how we can help you to recover any losses or give us a call on 0151 363 5895 to discuss your case in more depth.