A reader emailed me yesterday asking about an incident involving Chase. When I looked into it, I found that there was an incident first reported early last month involving a backup tape stored at an unnamed secure off-site facility that could not be located. On digging some more, I found that the incident had local news coverage at the time but no national news coverage.
The good folks over at OSF have a copy of a notification letter [pdf] dated August 13 2009 that they uploaded last month, but according to other sources, it appears that the same letter has also been sent out with a September date. One blog indicates receipt of the notification by August 7 whereas others are reporting first receiving the notification this week. Why Chase sent out two batches of notifications with different dates is unclear, but it does seem that people some people were notified a month ago while others are first being notified. The notification does not indicate when the tape was first discovered to be missing or for how long it may be missing.
WHAS-11 (ABC) had reported the news on August 18:
[…]
The company told WHAS11 a computer tape with customers’ personal information like name, address and social security number is lost.
Chase Bank released this statement to WHAS11 Tuesday morning, but indicated that no financial or banking information was on that tape. They said they have no evidence the computer tape was either viewed or mis-used.
[…]
Chase offered those affected free services for one year (pdf).