In what has emerged as the second large scale data blunder in just two days, personal details of over 35,000 taxpayers have been recovered from a computer sold on ebay.
Bought for just £6.99 ($15) the computer’s hard drive contained the names, addresses, bank account details and council tax bills of residents in the Charnwood Borough council area of Leicestershire. Recorded conversations relating to bill payments, divorces and deaths dating as far back as 2002 were also discovered on the computer.
While there is no doubt that this information had significant potential to be exploited, fortunately it landed in the hands of an innocuous computer programmer from Edinburgh.
The 36 year old, who wishes to remain nameless, bought the computer with a view to practicing his IT skills, completely oblivious to the information it contained. However, after he used recovery software to recall the data that remained on the hard drive he quickly came to realise the significance of what he had found.
He soon contacted the Charnwood Borough Council to notify them of the leak but astoundingly got no response.
"I can see from these documents who is having financial problems, and who is getting bailiffs sent round to their house" he is reported to have said.
"There is a lot of stuff many people would find interesting, like bank account numbers and sort codes from payments made over the phone."
"There is even information about a death on there. I was stunned to find 35,000 items - documents, photos, memos."
Both the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Leicestershire council are now conducting a thorough investigation into how this mistermeanour occurred. However, it has once again made the public question exactly how safe their information is in the hands of those they are supposed to trust.
This is particularly the case as yesterday it emerged that details of over 1 million UK bank customers had been recovered from a different computer sold on ebay. These included bank details and addresses as well as the respective mother’s maiden names and signatures of American Express, Natwest and RBS bank customers.
