Citigroup Reports Loss of Data
Citigroup Inc. said Monday that computer tapes containing account and payment history data, including Social Security numbers, on 3.9 million customers were lost by United Parcel Service Inc.
The disappearance is the latest in a series of reported data breaches involving U.S. companies, including Bank of America Corp. and Time Warner Inc.
New York-based Citigroup said UPS lost the tapes while shipping them to an Experian credit bureau in Texas.
The tapes covered CitiFinancial branch network customers and about 50,000 customers with closed accounts from CitiFinancial Retail Services. Customers of CitiFinancial Auto and CitiFinancial Mortgage are unaffected.
Citigroup, the world’s biggest bank, on Saturday mailed letters to customers about the problem. It said it had received no reports of unauthorized activity, and said there was “little risk” of the accounts being compromised.
“We were moving this using an enhanced security procedure we specified and developed with [UPS],” Kevin Kessinger, president of Citigroup’s North America consumer finance unit, said in an interview. “You can imagine how frustrated and disappointed we are that this occurred.”
Norman Black, a spokesman for Atlanta-based UPS, said, “We sincerely regret that in this case we have not been able to find this package. We did conduct an exhaustive search.”
Black said UPS was cooperating with Citigroup and would “do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In February, Bank of America said computer tapes containing data for about 1.2 million U.S. government employees, including U.S. senators, had disappeared.
Time Warner, the world’s biggest media company, in May said outside storage company Iron Mountain Inc. had lost computer backup tapes containing data on 600,000 current and former employees.
New Jersey authorities said they made several arrests this year over a scheme to steal records of hundreds of thousands of customers at Bank of America, Wachovia Corp., PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and Commerce Bancorp Inc.
Other companies to suffer recent data breaches include ChoicePoint Inc. and Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis unit.
