Are You Sick?

You will be when you read this!

"The state has notified federal civil rights authorities after a mistake made by a Florida company exposed private records of up to 71,000 poor and low-income Georgians over the Internet for at least eight days, officials said Wednesday."

Another report actually said some of this stuff may have been on the web for a month. I believe that. The worse the more likely it is that some moron, incompetent, untrained, and under paid subcontractor employee misbehaved with people's precious personal information!

So what was in this set of records, some general stuff that bureaucrats need to work with the poor? Not at all!

"The files, accidentally placed on the Internet by an employee of WellCare Health Plans Inc. of Tampa, may have included people's Social Security numbers, Medicaid or PeachCare for Kids numbers, and their names, birthdates and dates of eligibility for the insurance programs."

One of things that burns me up is that the journalists who write about Id theft always quote the culprits who will say stuff like "We don't have any evidence that the security of our clients has been compromised," and "there is no indication that any Identity theft has taken place" and "We are providing information on how people can check their credit record."

Specifically, "Those affected will receive free credit monitoring services for a year. WellCare also will tell people how to get two free credit reports a year from the Equifax, Experian and TransUnion credit bureaus."

Yeah well, I doubt of poor sick people will go to their wireless MacBook, log on and take care of this. We doubt that these folks can cope with this.

Every business writer in the USA should be forced to read out new book and take our Identity theft Prevention, protection, and Recovery certification workshop (two hours of very intense and interesting material on line at the student's convenience open 24-7 followed by quizzes and a certificate of completion!).

Moreover, these journalists don't seem to know what the serious consequences besides credit ratings can be when medical identity loss happens. In fact, we have a whole chapter in our new book "The Silent Crime" just on medical Id theft and the other forms of serious ID threat loss. To put it bluntly, credit and credit card losses are the least of people's problems!

Source: "71,000 warned about identity theft after records breach. Those affected to receive credit monitoring for a year," By BILL HENDRICK, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 04/09/08.