Thousands of Lloyds customers have personal details stolen
Lloyds Bank has confirmed that thousands of its Premier Account customers had their personal details stolen, following the theft of a data box on 30 July. It was taken from a data room belonging to Royal Sun Alliance insurance (RSI). The police were informed, however, it appears that no one has had their accounts compromised and there is no evidence so far that it was stolen by fraudsters, says RSA.
The personal details of thousands of Lloyds customers have gone missing in a suspected theft.

A storage device disappeared from the offices of an insurance firm in July – but customers were only informed last week when the company wrote to them.

The Royal Sun Alliance admitted they did not call police immediately either while they tried to solve the mystery of the missing data ‘internally’.

The affected customers had paid £25-a-month for a ‘premier’ packaged account which included home insurance with RSA.

The personal details of thousands of Lloyds customers have gone missing in a suspected theft

But thousands now fear their names, addresses, account numbers, and sort codes are in the hands of criminals after receiving letters informing them of the breach.

The information went missing on Jul 30 from one of the insurance firm’s data centres.

But RSA refused to say where the data had been stolen from or what date they called the police, saying only that they had informed a ‘regional organised crime unit’.

They also waited several weeks before informing customers.

Privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office – which can fine companies up to £500,000 for having inadequate data protection – is now looking into the matter.

An RSA spokesman said: ‘Unfortunately a data storage device has been reported as stolen from one of our data centres.

‘We have advised our regulators and are in the process of contacting potentially impacted customers to apologise.

‘We are working with the police on a full investigation.

‘We recognise this should never have happened and apologise to all of our customers who have been impacted.’

The London-based company has offered affected customers free identity theft insurance for two years.

But customers must buy this themselves and pay a £20 before requesting a refund from RSA.

A spokesman added that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that this data has been misused in any way’.

The breach affects customers who made a claim on their emergency home cover between 2006 and 2012.

It is the latest in a string of serious data breaches by large corporations, raising fears that customer data is not being stored safely.

The affected customers had paid £25-a-month for a ‘premier’ packaged account which included home insurance with RSA

Last month, furious customers questioned why Carphone Warehouse waited three days before making it public that hackers had stolen the details of millions of customers.

The mobile phone retailer raised the alarm belatedly, issuing a statement in which it said it had been the victim of a ‘sophisticated cyber-attack’.

They revealed details of as many as 2.4million customers may have been accessed, including names, addresses, date of birth information and bank details.

The credit card data of 90,000 customers ‘may also have been accessed’, although this was encrypted, the firm said.

A spokesman for Lloyds bank said: ‘RSA was the Home Emergency insurance cover provider for a small number of Lloyds Premier Account holders and the data was held as per standard data retention requirements and processes.