Can I sue someone for giving out my social security and personal information?
I’m closing on a property and the title company sent my loan documents to the wrong email address. The documents contain my social security number, birthdate, salary, pretty much every piece of personal financial information on me. This was sent to someone with essentially the same name as me. Do I have any legal recourse against the company for mishandling my information? Short of changing all my personal info, I think I may need to enroll in an identity protection service. Can I sue them for the cost of this? If I use this service for the rest of my life are they responsible for the entire cost?
The loan documents were scanned as pdfs and sent in an email as attachments
As far as negligence, the representative has my correct email since I’ve copied her on other correspondences. Its not a case where I wrote down the wrong email adresss and gave it to her.
While I know there are no monetary damages yet, I will have to take preventive measures now that my personal information has been compromised. My thought is that the company should be responsible for paying for any costs I have to incur such as the fee for an identity theft protection service. These are generally annual fees so would it be reasonable to sue for amount that would cover the fees for a period of time?
Thanks for the responses
A successful lawsuit requires you to prove both negligence and damages.
Negligence is something that rises above a simple mistake, so I can not have an opinion without more information. At this point, there are no damages unless the other party uses the information unlawfully.
You can try requestion compensation for a credit check, but don’t count on it. You can do a free check on yourself once a year anyway. I have the website, I’ll update the link when I find it.
November 16th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Yes you do. It is the responsibility of the company to make sure that information is kept private and is held responsible for any mishaps.
References :
November 16th, 2009 at 7:12 am
I am having trouble understanding this, why would you have loan papers sent to an e-mail address. Are you talking about a fax machine address?
References :
November 16th, 2009 at 7:21 am
A successful lawsuit requires you to prove both negligence and damages.
Negligence is something that rises above a simple mistake, so I can not have an opinion without more information. At this point, there are no damages unless the other party uses the information unlawfully.
You can try requestion compensation for a credit check, but don’t count on it. You can do a free check on yourself once a year anyway. I have the website, I’ll update the link when I find it.
References :
Law enforcement since 1991
November 16th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Since e-mail is not a secure form of communication, this is not considered intent which is what is needed to prove a crime. Recommend that you put out a fraud alert on your identity
References :
http://www.lifelock.com