One million bank accounts going, going, gone for £35 on eBay

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 15:55

Your IT - Home IT

When Andrew Chapman from Oxford, England successfully bid £35 for an old computer on eBay he wasn't expecting to have the details of a million bank accounts thrown in for free...

Sometimes it seems like hardly a day goes past without news breaking of the staggering incompetence of both government and big business to protect the data being held about us.

And so it should not really have come as any surprise to discover over the Bank Holiday weekend in the United Kingdom that yet another data protection fiasco has blundered its way into the spotlight.

This time it is the not so small matter of an old computer that sold on eBay for the princely sum of just UKP £35.

If the seller had mentioned it contained personal information on customers of American Express, NatWest Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland he could probably have got a lot more.

After all, criminal gangs specialising in selling this kind of information could have made a small fortune out of the information which had been left on the hard drive of this particular computer.

Information which apparently included bank account and credit card numbers, mobile phone numbers, names and addresses, digitised signatures, sort codes and mothers' maiden names.

In fact, 'an old computer' was underselling this and the savvy auction seller could have advertised it as a 'complete identity theft kit' instead.

It would appear that the computer had previously belonged to a company called Graphic Data which stored information for financial organisations.

An ex-employee sold it on eBay, and now Graphic Data is trying to get it back.

Re-arrange these words to suit: Door, Bolted, Stable, Horse, After, Closing.

People in the UK are getting used to their personal information being treated with scant respect for privacy these days. After all, we have just had the Home Office admitting to the loss of data on all 84,000 prisoners in the UK.

And still the privacy pantomime continues. How many government laptops and mobile phones containing sensitive data have been lost or stolen in the last three years? Find out on page 2...

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