T-Mobile Data Breach: Employee Sells Client Info To Rival Firms

by amyellensoden | November 18, 2009 at 10:24 am

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UK operators of T-Mobile have suffered their largest data breach to date after an employee of the phone firm sold thousands of client details and profiles to brokers who in turn sold the information to rival phone firms. The information was sold by one of their employees without the company's knowledge. T-Mobile clients whose information has been sold have already been receiving cold calls from rival phone firms trying to lure them away from T-Mobile.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has now confirmed that millions of records have been bought for substantial amounts of money. A formal investigation is underway with various premises having been raided. The ICO is taking this breach of the data protection law very seriously. They have identified the breach source but the offender remains unnamed at this point. The responsible individual will possibly be facing prosecution and jail time.

The ICO did not name the network, but a spokesman for T-Mobile confirmed it "proactively" approached the watchdog after finding evidence that an employee, who has left the company, had been illegally selling customer details. "We have since put systems in place to minimise the risk of it happening again," a T-Mobile spokesman said.

Competition between mobile phone companies is so prevalent due to the commission incentives for phone firm employees if they sign up new clients for lengthy contracts. This T-Mobile breach could cause a huge loss of clients, especially in lieu of the recent network problems of service data loss that the US firm suffered earlier this year. T-Mobile has over 16 million customers in the UK who are now quite possibly concerned not only for network reliability, but the confidentiality of their personal information.