Bud Gillett reports:
A CBS 11 News viewer tipped us off to a breach of security at a local business that can put customers’ private financial information at risk.
The viewer told CBS 11 News he took the photos at the dumpster behind a Mattress Firm store at the southwest corner of Glade Road and State Highway 121 in Euless.
Names, addresses, sometimes social security numbers and even credit card numbers. The kind of information that if taken altogether might make the unwary customer vulnerable to identify theft. Some transactions take place as far back as 2002. All on public display for anyone passing by the dumpster, according to our viewer.
Read more on CBS DFW. The news station obtained a statement from Mattress Firm:
It has come to our attention that during a standard clean-out effort, customer paperwork older than seven years was discarded in a dumpster outside one of our stores in the Dallas area. Unfortunately, some of this paperwork included personally-identifying information such as names, addresses and in some cases credit card or social security numbers.
While we have policies in place to protect sensitive personal information, it is clear that these policies were not clearly communicated in this case, and for that we are truly sorry. We take protecting our customer’s personal information very seriously and are working diligently to ensure that we have secure disposal processes going forward. Additionally, social security and credit card numbers are no longer included on any of our store-level paperwork and have not been since 2006.
All of the discarded customer information has been safely retrieved, and we are in the process of contacting all customers affected to personally notify them of the situation and to offer free identity protection services and credit monitoring for a year.
While we are contacting affected customers, if any customer has questions about this issue, they may contact us at 1.866.942.3551.