About 106 million U.S. and Canadian personal information has been stolen by a hacker, Capital One said in a July 29 statement. Capital One discovered the hacking on July 19 and immediately asked law enforcement to help catch the suspects. Paige Thompson, 33, was arrested on July 29 and charged with online fraud and abuse. Thompson is a former software engineer for a Seattle technology company.
The information obtained by the hackers included personal information such as the user’s name, address and contact number, as well as the user’s credit score, social security number of nearly 140,000 customers and related bank account number of nearly 80,000, Capital One said. Thankfully, the hackers did not obtain the user’s credit card account number. Affected are about 100 million users in the United States and 6 million in Canada. About a million social security numbers in Canada have also been hit.
Capital One is a major U.S. credit card issuer with nearly $373.6 billion in assets. It believes that the stolen information was unlikely to have been used for fraud, but further investigation would continue. In addition, Capital One will notify affected users and provide them with free credit monitoring and identity protection.
Chairman Richard Dana Fairbank apologized to the people who have been affected in this accident and promised to make it right.
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