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Bank of America Loses A Million Customer Records

Cnet news.com reports:

A "small" number of backup tapes with records detailing the financial information of government employees were lost in shipment to a backup center, Bank of America said on Friday.

The tapes contained information on the customers and accounts of the U.S. government's SmartPay charge card program, which has more than 2.1 million members and annual transactions totaling more than $21 billion, according to the General Services Administration. Reports have pegged the number of cards affected at 1.2 million.

"Federal law enforcement officials were immediately engaged when the tapes were discovered missing, and subsequently conducted a thorough investigation into the matter, working closely with Bank of America," the bank said in a statement. "The investigation to date has found no evidence to suggest the tapes or their content have been accessed or misused, and the tapes are now presumed lost."

Now that's bad customer intuition. Loosing your customer data is a good prediction of future customer behavior. It's a good prediction that they will no longer be your customers.

Last week there was a rash of stories reporting data security problems at major consumer companies.

Are you taking care to safeguard your customer data? Do you have a plan or experience dealing with a customer data loss situation? Any advice you'd like to share? Leave a comment.

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February 25, 2005 in award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, Brand enhancement, Business newsletter, Web/Tech | Permalink

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Comments

I think this situation only reveals a glimpse of the inappropriate handling of customer records at Bank of America.

I was not one of the customers whose data was lost on that truck, yet people in various customer care departments can not access my data. In fact 2 department told me that since they do not have access to account information that I had to fax them my statements so they could scan it into the system. The first time I was told this I didn't think much of it, but the 2nd time seems excessive.

I hope Bank of America invests in the infrastructure it needs allow it's associates access to information while preventing unauthorized access.

Until that time Bank of America customers beware!

Posted by: d | Jul 26, 2005 8:25:31 PM