Posted on Thursday 26 January 2006
It was reported by various news outfits that Ameriprise Financial Inc., the former brokerage unit of American Express Co., has acknowledged that a company laptop computer which contained information on about 158,000 customers had been stolen.
Ameriprise said the theft occurred when an employee’s vehicle was broken into at “an off-site location.” MacMillan declined to say where the incident occurred except that it was not in Minneapolis, the Midwestern U.S. city where Ameriprise is headquartered.MacMillan said the Ameriprise employee, while cleared to have the information on his laptop and in his possession outside the office, had not complied with company security policies and had been terminated.
“The data didn’t have the security it’s supposed to have when it’s off premises,” MacMillan said. “That was a violation of policy.”
MacMillan said the 158,000 customers listed in the laptop — 5.6 percent of Ameriprise’s 2.8 million clients — had one thing in common: they’d recently changed their advisers.
The theft is the latest in a series of high-profile data breaches that have raised concerns about identity theft.