It seems Equifax Canada can't get the fax or the facts right after the credit agency sent detailed personal information about three Canadians to a Lindsay man.
Scot Paterson, 42, who's been battling the agency for two years to update his credit history, received a fax this week with the addresses, social insurance numbers, driver's licences and credit card information on three people living in Scarborough, Ottawa and Montreal.
When his wife called the company to notify them of the privacy breach, she was told it was "impossible" for such an error to occur and that they were too busy to check their faxes, he said.
Paterson got the profiles on three strangers within minutes of faxing his own personal information to Equifax in a bid to straighten out his credit history.
"This is ridiculous. This is personal information. Now I'm wondering who's got my Visa number," said Paterson, a supervisor at a Whitby print company.
After inquiries from the Sun, Equifax spokesman Marie-Lynn Colangelo confirmed yesterday that the private information was indeed sent in error.
SHUT DOWN FAX SERVER
"We've launched an investigation with our technology (department). We've certainly shut down the fax server at this point," she said. "We don't know exactly what's happened but an investigation is in full course."
Equifax Canada maintains a database of 21 million files on Canadian consumers and their credit ratings.
The company made headlines in March 2004 after criminals posing as legitimate credit grantors stole reports on 1,400 people, primarily from British Columbia and Alberta. The files included SINs, bank account numbers, credit histories and addresses.
In related news, CitiFinancial, the consumer finance subsidiary of Citigroup, was grappling yesterday with one of the largest breaches of data security to date.
The company announced it is notifying some 3.9 million U.S. customers that computer tapes containing information about their accounts -- including social security numbers and payment histories -- have been lost.
Citigroup, which is based in New York, said Monday the tapes were lost by UPS in transit to a credit bureau.
