Careless & thoughtless - Bank of Ireland

Did you hear about the four bank robberies that cost a bank about €500,000, but about which the bank did practically nothing? Funny enough, three of those robberies were not 'bank robberies' as such, but rather instances where officers of the bank had over €100,000 in the trunks of their cars and the money was stolen from there. And, so at ease was the bank in question that the robberies weren't even reported up the chain of command for months.

You didn't hear about that? You didn't because it didn't happen. No bank would be so lax with so much money. Yet, the Bank of Ireland is that lax with its customers' information, which they put on laptops that then get thrown in their officers' cars.

The laptops contained information about medical backgrounds, life assurance, bank account details, names and addresses of up to 10,000 Bank of Ireland customers.

The Bank of Ireland confirmed the laptops were stolen between June and October 2007. It claimed the theft was only brought to the attention of the "appropriate authorities" in the bank over the "past number of weeks".

10,000 customers' information was on those laptops, but the bank didn't consider it important enough to even notify the customers in question. "Bank of Ireland said it was planning to contact all of the customers affected". They're still "planning to contact" the customers even though the robberies occurred between 6 & 10 months ago. Arrogance doesn't quite fit. Contempt is closer to it.

I tell you, my personal information is worth more than €50 to me as it is I'm sure to all 10,000 of those whose information was 'lost'. That values the information at over €500K, but the bank hardly gives a damn.

I'm not even sure why all this information is allowed on laptops to begin with. Why not force all their officers who travel with laptops to use secure networks rather than saving all this detail on an all-too-easily stolen laptop? Again, probably too expensive for the Bank to make such an effort.

And, you can already tell that the fall-out for the bank will be minimal.