Student Loan Processor Exposes 3.3 Million Students to Identity Theft
If you want to go to college, obtaining student loans is often necessary. For 3.3 million students, this bad news is their student loan processor just exposed them to identity theft.
Educational Credit Management Corp is a big player in the student loan industry. Never heard of it? This is because the company, better known as ECMC, handles the processing of your loans instead of lending the money. This means the name of the company rarely appears on your documents.
The company is reporting that there was a break in at one of its offices. The thieves were able to steal "portable media" that contained data on 3.3 million students that had taken out loans. The data was a veritable Holy Grail for the thieves. It is reputed to have included the legal name of the student, their address and their social security number. This is all that is needed to open credit card and other financial accounts, which makes this a classic identity theft case.
The interesting thing is anonymous reports are suggesting the items stolen were in safes in the office. This raises many interesting questions. Since an office of this sort would not have cash, the thieves had to be coming specifically for the student identity data. All though it is pure conjecture on my part, this would seem to suggest an inside job. After all, who would know what ECMC did much less that it would have such valuable data in its safe? Interesting, no?
As is typical in these cases, ECMC is trotting out the usual lame response. It is providing the impacted students with a letter detailing what happened and its response. It is also providing them with free credit monitoring services through Experian. Of course, this does nothing to help the students when their identities start being replicated and used across the world.
ECMC really can't be blamed excessively for this identity theft situation. They did have the information in a safe after all. Still, it boggles the mind that they would keep the data for all 3.3 million students on a portable media platform that someone could just walk off with.