Last May, Ryan Pirozzi visited his mailbox in Edina, Minn., and found it overflowing with more than a dozen bank statements.
All were made out to his address. All held sensitive information about various accounts.
Homeowners association president Bob Butchko was angered when Falls Church condominium residents' tax forms containing private information were sent to someone in Minnesota because of a clerical error. The problem was uncorrected for nine months.
(Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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He just wishes some of them had been his.
Because of a few wayward keystrokes by a clerk at a bank processing center, Pirozzi has for nine months received the financial statements of scores of strangers, many of whom are Washington area residents and all of whom had had Wachovia Corp. escrow accounts.
Pirozzi tried desperately to get the problem fixed once the first batch arrived last spring, but he says that no one at the bank or at a local title company that helped establish the accounts took action on his repeated calls. It was only in the past few weeks, after Pirozzi began receiving strangers' tax forms and after inquiries from a Washington Post reporter, that both companies began to investigate.
"I potentially have access to their Social Security numbers and their names. I also have their bank account numbers. That's very private information," Pirozzi said. "I don't know what I could do with all of that -- I don't have a criminal mind. But there are definitely opportunities."
Privacy experts agree.
"This is a raft of sensitive financial information that would be an identity thief's dream," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America.
Experiences like Pirozzi's are rare in an industry that depends on sophisticated computers and software to shuffle billions of transactions a day. But it nevertheless points to the vulnerabilities in systems that have become so highly automated that small errors in the management of databases can quickly become amplified into major security breaches, consumer advocates say. They say, too, that the lack of a prompt response from the companies involved reflects a broader problem with financial institutions not doing all they can to safeguard their clients' private information.
And when that happens, fraud can result. Identity theft topped the Federal Trade Commission's list of fraud complaints for the fifth year in a row in 2004. A 2003 FTC study showed that 27.3 million Americans had been victims of identity theft in the previous five years, including nearly 10 million in the previous year alone.
