27,000 Social Security Numbers Stolen from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida – An ACCESS Fraud Alert

An outside contractor for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida data on 27,000 customers and employees of the company. The data included Social Security Numbers.

 

The contractor, who has not been named due to an ongoing FBI investigation, had been given access to one of Blue Cross’s databases. That access was used to transfer the information from Blue Cross to other computers via e-mail. More than half of the stolen data belonged to current and former employees of the company.

 

Blue Cross has begun notifying those affected by the theft. This is the company’s second incident in twelve months, inadvertently exposing consumer data. In August, the company exposed the Social Security Numbers of 200 long term care patients in a mass mailing.

 

It should be noted that Blue Cross is made up of a number of different companies, all of which belong to the Blue Cross Association. Only Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida was involved with these data breaches.

 

If you have reason to believe that you may have been impacted by either of these breaches, you can Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida at 800-461-1719. The company has offered to pay for one year of credit monitoring for anyone whose data was involved.

 

ACCESS would like to remind its readers that all credit monitoring does is notify you when changes to your credit report occur. It does nothing to stop identity theft in the first place, or to help you repair your credit after an identity theft has occurred. Anyone accepting an offer of credit monitoring from any company who has exposed their data should read the fine print of the offer carefully. Make sure that you are not giving up any of your rights by accepting such an offer.

 

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