Countrywide Financial Identity Theft Settlement On Track

Countrywide Financial is on track to get approval for a massive identity theft settlement with consumers. The settlement would constitute the end of a class action lawsuit.

When you say “Countrywide”, visions of some of the worst mortgage abuses in the industry come to mind. When the housing market burst, Countrywide started deflating like an untied balloon whipping around a room. For some odd reason, Bank of America swooped in a purchased the troubled entity in a deal that can only be called a head scratcher. This was all the more the case when it became apparent that Countrywide handled customer identity security about as well as it did mortgages, which is to say not well at all.

A security breach in the corporate world usually involves the exposure of a relatively small number of identities. This is because businesses partition databases to prevent a massive exposure. They can happen when a business doesn’t have a clue. Countrywide was different. Unlike the mortgage fiasco at the company, the identity theft issues were a one man show.

The man in question was Rene Rebollo, Jr. He was a senior analyst for the company. While taking a break from analyzing data each week, he would casually download the information on 20,000 Countrywide customers every week. He did this for two years. How did he get caught? The man he sold the data to, Wahid Siddiqi, was nailed selling it to FBI agents in a sting. It is unclear how much data Rebollo is believed to have copied, but the proposed settlement covers 17 million individuals. That, my friend, is a lot of copying!



As you might imagine, the lawsuits started flying pretty quickly after this was discovered. 35 were instituted and a massive settlement plan is now proposed. Countrywide will provide free credit monitoring to all the 17 million impacted customers. It will also pay up to $50,000 in damages to each person assuming there was an actual loss that was not reimbursed by some other party and the loss more likely than not was caused by the Countrywide security breach.

The best part of this is the comment by Bank of America. A spokesman noted it the settlement was in the bank’s “best interest”. Undoubtedly, the spokesman was also thinking that it would have been in the best interest of Bank of America to run and flee when it first even considered looking at Countrywide as a purchase!

<< Back to Identity Theft Headlines