More bad news for Capital One. After suffering from a data breach, the company is now facing another class action lawsuit.
Late last month, Capital One suffered from a large data breach where 100 million customers had their personal information exposed. The breach garnered considerable mainstream media coverage at the time.
It probably wasn’t a surprise that, the very next day, we found out that a class action lawsuit was filed against the company. That lawsuit, of course, was filed within the United States.
Now, there is more legal trouble for Capital One. According to Global News, an additional class action lawsuit has been filed against Capital One. This time, the lawsuit has been filed in Vancouver, Canada. From the report:
A Vancouver law firm says a class action lawsuit has been launched on behalf of six million Canadians whose personal information was compromised by a data breach at Capital One Financial Corp.
Ted Charney, lead counsel of Charney Lawyers, says the breach may turn out to be “extremely serious.”
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says it is investigating the hack, which included one million social insurance numbers that had been accessed without authorization.
So, it seems that legal action is being taken in Canada as well. It probably isn’t really a surprise that a breach this size has resulted in legal action from multiple jurisdictions. If anything, this follows the standard roadmap of a large data breach. For those who have followed the Marriott Hotels data breach, all this is practically déjà vu.
Since the privacy commissioner in Canada said that they are investigating, it really wouldn’t be a surprise if this is not the extent of Capital One’s legal problems.
Update: For those who want information on the class action lawsuit from the law firm filing this, you can check out their site at CapitalOneClassAction.ca.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
how do I get in this lawsuit
That’s a great question, actually. I did some digging around and it looks like the law firm filing this lawsuit has set up a website for those who were affected or are thinking of joining in on it. You can check out their site here.
I’ll amend the article to reflect this as well.
I am terrified now that I see the writeup on CBS news about the person associated and with guns and dangerous people. I live alone recently widowed and I am probably more afraid of my personal information than my social insurance which they claim have not been breached but I don’t believe that . It isn’t fair that I trusted them and now I am afraid to live normally. Who knows what is going on behind the scenes and Capital One register us for Credit ratings etc but that only protects purchases etc, not personal things and identity . All our other cards cost money to register for fraud protection . They also scan your licence when applying in the stores . So ?
One way to look at it is the fact that the person responsible for the hack is going to remain in prison until trial (source). The reason was that the hacker was deemed a flight risk, so if anything, she is seen as someone who wants to run and hide more than anything else.
As for companies claiming information hasn’t been breached, this is a very frustrating aspect of data breaches. There have been numerous instances in the past where a company says that data hasn’t been breached only to have evidence pop up later saying that it has. This, to me, creates a lot of unnecessary uncertainty. People who have been breached won’t know until something happens. People who haven’t been breached, but are concerned, will have reason to not be trusting of the company because there is always that shadow of a doubt.
I agree that it isn’t fair that that trust has been violated. Believe me, as a victim myself of someone hacking one of my financial accounts, I know from personal experience a lot of those feelings. Unfortunately, in my case, I was completely blindsided and had no way of knowing what went wrong when or how. Fraud just randomly showed up one day. What helped me get through my experience was just normal vigilance. Checking the accounts on occasion and seeing if there is anything I don’t recognize. E-mail alerts do help a lot as well. If you can, you could also create cell phone alerts as well.
Stressing out over it to the point of not living a normal life is also unhealthy. I don’t know if this is what you are thinking, but I’m sure the idea of suddenly having all of your accounts drained of every penny is frightening to anyone. The thing is, you have options to get others to rectify things. If you see fraudulent activity on your credit card, contact the people behind the credit card company. If you see fraudulent activity in your bank account, speak with your bank. Believe me, it’s not worth that kind of stress if it is affecting your ability to live.
If you are from the US (which I’m guessing judging by the fact that you were checking out CBS), the class action lawsuit filed against Capital One (or, at least one of them) was filed by Morgan & Morgan. You might want to check out their page on the lawsuit here. It’s possible to get free credit monitoring if you have been affected, but do know that the lawsuit is ongoing for the time being. They have ways you can contact them about your experience. Maybe they can help you further.
Hopefully, this helps you.