Bank loses data on 3.9m Customers

Bosses at Citigroup are redfaced after admitting that they've lost unencrypted backup tapes containing data on 3.9m customer accounts. According to reports, the Bank sent the data via UPS to a credit beureau in Texas - but the tapes failed to show:

Citigroup, the world's largest bank, on Monday said account and payment history data on 3.9 million of its customers were lost in transit by United Parcel Service.

The disappearance is the latest in a series of data breaches involving U.S. banks, including No. 2 Bank of America.

New York-based Citigroup said the data were stored on computer tapes, and lost while UPS, the world's biggest package carrier, was transporting them to an Experian credit bureau in Texas.

The tapes, which also contained Social Security numbers, covered CitiFinancial Branch Network customers and about 50,000 customers with closed accounts from CitiFinancial Retail Services. Customers of CitiFinancial Auto and CitiFinancial Mortgage are unaffected.

More from ZDNet here.

Ouch! If there's any of you guys have accounts with Citi, it'd be interesting to know how the banks spin dept is coping with this. You can discuss the case of the disappearing data tapes over in the news discussion forum.