Do you work for a brokerage firm? If it is Merrill Lynch, you might have been one of 33,000 employees that CNBC reported as having had personal information stolen from the company in August of last year. Those who were affected have been notified, however, have they been closely watching their credit report for the past year? Did they receive complimentary credit monitoring service or enroll in a protection service? Apparently. the data was stolen from a corporate office in New Jersey. Those affected should keep in mind that even with the passing of time, the data is still compromised.

For those of you who might be clients of this company, this incident did not include the personal information of any of the firm’s clients. At least, not that was reported. However, it won’t hurt to take a look at your credit report to be sure that you are safe as well.

Everyone needs to regularly monitor their own credit reports to be sure they are not a victim of identity theft. This is not something that will automatically alarm you. Some victims have had their identity being used for years without their knowledge. Monitoring bank accounts and current credit card activity is good, however, there could be accounts open in your name that you are not even aware of. Those accounts can have growing, unpaid balances over a long period of time without you ever being alerted. Your address and phone number were not used to open those accounts.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 7:13 am and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.