Account details of 21 million Germans available on CD
December 9th, 2008[Google translation from German to English. – WK]
Wirtschaftswoche
06.12.2008On the black market for personal data after searching the business week, the bank accounts of 21 million German citizens in circulation. Then, in extreme cases, three out of four households in Germany fear that money deducted from her checking account, without ever that they have given a direct debit.
Dusseldorf magazine was the gigantic amount of data for almost twelve million euros offered. A CD with 1.2 million customers received the Business Week as a model. In addition to the Personal details such as dates of birth include the records with the bank account number and bank code, in some cases even more detailed information on assets.
The Duesseldorf prosecutor in the week, the explosive economic data on Thursday passed, must now clarify how so many account numbers illegally in circulation could. According to Business Week first traces lead almost completely on small call center operators. To serve mainly to highly competitive mass markets such as telecommunications, power or cable television many suppliers almost exclusively external service providers and call centers. These receive the relevant customer data in part by the client. Turn the service providers for their subcontractors, lost control over the data sometime in nothingness.
[…]
You see?
Just like we, and other people have been saying, the data that is collected in any database, once it gets out, either wholesale or piecemeal will be collected by criminals, compiled and then sold to whoever wants it.
You are guaranteed that before this newspaper, ‘received the Business Week as a model the CD’ that this information was used for many months to slowly leech money from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of people; think about it; you take a random amount from 20 to 90 euros from each account, spread over a large number of accounts in different banks, going to many different bank accounts and there will be no pattern to discern. Once you have done this, the data is useless because any further harvesting will set off alarms. That is when the data is valuable only as something to sell to the criminals on the lower rungs, who have a different risk threshold.
This will be repeated with every sort of data imaginable, because all data is valuable to someone.
That means, again, that:
- ContactPoint will be released on DVDR.
- The NIR will be released on DVDR.
- <insert name of government database> will be released on DVDR.
And remember; just because you have not read about a particular database being leaked, that does not mean that it has not happened. Criminals can keep secrets and so can governments; many times the latter does not know that the former has access.
What a mess!
And what is so galling, infuriating and exhasperating is the fact that Gordon Mass Murdering agromegly Monster Brown admits that government can never keep databases safe and yet they are going ahead anyway with ContactPoint. A most disturbing, sickening and irresponsible action…but then again, what is putting 11 million children in a shopping cart for paedophiles compared to mass murdering one million people? It’s nothing at all, and that is the problem; once you have graduated to the level of a murderer, anything else bad that is less severe than murder is trivial.
That is what you have running the UK.