The misbehavior of the employees is coming very expensive for AT&T. The group has failed to prevent that data could get stolen in their call centers. They got prosecuted now with a thick fine of the US supervision.
The US mobile giant AT&T has to pay millions, because employees have stolen data in the call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines from nearly 280,000 customers. AT&T had accepted a comparison of over 25 million dollars.
Employees had unauthorized access to customer accounts and provided data - have passed on to third parties – even sometimes sensitive information like social security information. The FCC assumed that the information was then used, inter alia, to unlock stolen smart phones.
"Today's actions show that supervisory exercises its full authority against companies that fail to protect the personal information of its customers," said FCC chief Tom Wheeler. The Authority had started their investigation in May 2014..
Triggers were three AT&T employees in Mexico, which should have sold during 168 days data from more than 68,000 customer accounts starting at November 2013. In the course of the investigation came out that a further 40 employees were involved in this illegal practice and additional more than 211,000 customer accounts were affected.
Source: http://www.fcc.gov/document/att-pay-25m-settle-investigation-three-data-breaches-0