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ABN Amro loses tape with data on 2 million mortgage customers; claims no customer identities compromised
By Tom Henderson
Dec. 16, 2005 11:09 AM
ABN Amro Mortgage Group Inc., an Ann Arbor-based subsidiary of Chicago-based LaSalle Bank Corp., admitted Friday that it had lost a computer tape nearly a month ago containing data for all 2 million of its residential-mortgage customers.
Data on the tape included the names of the customers, addresses, payment histories, loan numbers and Social Security numbers. It did not include any credit-card numbers
About 320,000 are customers of Troy-based LaSalle Bank Midwest, which changed its name from Standard Federal Bank in September.
The company said the tape was lost while being transported by DHL from the mortgage company’s data-processing center in Chicago to a center in Allen, Texas, operated by Experian, one of the national credit-reporting agencies.
A package containing the tape was picked up Nov. 18 and never arrived at the Experian site.
In a telephone news conference Friday morning, Thomas Goldstein, chairman and CEO of ABN Amro Mortgage, said the bank called Experian on Monday to confirm that the tape had arrived. When told that it had not, “We immediately implemented a customer-security-breech response plan,” he said.
Goldstein said DHL, Experian and ABN Amro began searching for the tape. He said the search was halted and letters were sent to customers several days before Friday’s announcement.
“It is presumed missing and lost," he said of the tape. "We began screening for the misuse of data as soon as we discovered the tape was missing. If we had noticed any misuse, we would have notified customers earlier."
Goldstein said ABN Amro is offering to enroll its mortgage customers in a credit-monitoring service of their choice for 90 days at no cost to them. He also said the company no longer delivers physical copies of data but transmits them by encrypted electronic means.
Goldstein said the delivery system had been scheduled months ago to go to electronic transmission in December. “I personally am sick we missed this thing by one month,” he said.
