Security Breaches and Identity Theft

Have you been the victim of identity theft? Do you believe that your personal information was taken due to a security breach on the part of a bank, an insurance company or some other business that was supposed to keep that data safe?

Identity theft can be costly, but you may have the right to pursue action against the business or the data warehouse that was tasked with keeping your information safe. You may be able to obtain compensation for the losses you have suffered.

How Identity Theft Happens

While there are certainly individual cases of identity theft in which a criminal gets access to someone’s personal information, perhaps more common are cases of mass security breaches that allow the personal information of many people to fall into the wrong hands.

Initially, it is reasonable to hold the bank, insurance company or other business that gathered the information accountable.

In actuality, these businesses are often victims as well. They enlist data warehouses to hold all of their customers’ personal information. When these warehouses fail to keep that information secure, the business will have to pay all the costs of cleaning up the mess, which may include reissuing credit cards and more.

Security Breaches Impact More Than One Person

At the Texas law firm of Caddell & Chapman, our attorneys have more than two decades of experience handling significant consumer protection cases on a national level.

Our first step is to determine how many people were impacted by a security breach. Our goal is to file a class action lawsuit to compensate you for identity theft and compensate everyone else who suffered due to the same error.

We also represent banks that are victims in security breach cases, putting our experience to work to hold data warehouses accountable for identity theft issues. For example, we served as co-lead and liaison counsel in litigation against Heartland Payment Systems over the largest data breach in history — over 130 million consumer files. Heartland processes payment card transactions for about 250,000 merchants and handles an average of more than 100 million transactions per month and more than $80 billion in transactions a year. Heartland provides merchants with the ability to accept debit and credit cards as payments by connecting the merchants’ card terminals with the card issuer to verify the transaction, and then moving the funds from the issuing bank to the merchant’s band account. In late January 2009, Heartland admitted that it had a massive security breach resulting in the compromise of up to 100 million credit card numbers resulting from a break into Heartland’s systems, perhaps as early as May 2008. Software that was used to steal card data was implanted into Heartland’s systems. As a result of this breach, confidential information regarding Plaintiffs’ customers and the credit card accounts Plaintiffs’ established for its customers was compromised.

Contact us today at our office in Houston to discuss your case with an experienced lawyer.