April 20, CSO Online — A $15 million penalty. In January, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) levied a landmark $15 million penalty against data broker ChoicePoint because it allowed criminals posing as businesses to access the personal data of 163,000 consumers. Of that sum, $5 million is being used to create a fund for victims of fraud or identity theft due to 4 the data breach. Now, the FTC needs to find victims, quantify losses, and determine how much
will it take to compensate victims of such a massive breach. Chris Keller of the FTC's new Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, says that with a very narrow exception, the fund cannot be used to reimburse victims for lost time or other intangibles. The FTC is working with law enforcement and creditors to determine exactly whose information has been misused. Of
particular concern are the 10,000 consumers for whom ChoicePoint gave out full credit reports. Keller says such data "permits the identity thief to see if a person's identity is worth stealing...My expectation −− and this gets into the realm of speculation −− would be that those 10,000 [identities] would either be used fairly quickly or not at all."

Source: http://www.csoonline.com/read/040106/penalty.html

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