Chase Screws 2.6 Million Circuit City Customers

When I was twenty-something, one of my first credit cards was a Circuit City Card. It was paid off long ago and the card clipped and thrown away. I confirmed the account was closed and I never heard from them again.

Until yesterday. I got a letter from Chase Card Services explaining to me that the old information, including my social security number, is hopefully at the bottom of a deep pit in some landfill somewhere, but uh… the Card Services company isn’t completely sure that’s where it is. It seems that they can’t tell the difference between backup tapes and old Pizza boxes. Idiots.

From CIO.com here:

Chase Card Services has dumped tapes containing millions of customers details in a landfill site.

The company will now have to tell 2.6 million current and former credit card customers of Circuit City that tapes containing their details were tossed out when they were mistaken for rubbish. Chase is apparently working with both local and national authorities to find out what happened, but it thinks they were in a locked box that was crushed and dumped in the landfill hole.

There is no evidence that the tapes or their contents have been accessed or misused, the company said. And CEO Rich Srednicki issued a statement promising that: “The privacy of our customers personal information is of utmost importance to us, and we take the responsibility to safeguard this information very seriously.”

Utmost importance huh? Just not important enough to properly label your backup tapes. Yeah, blame it on the immigrant cleaning crew. That’s the ticket. They should fire anyone who was responsible for the handling of this data.

Chase is offering me one free year of credit monitoring. I may just take them up on that.