Customers Sue Countrywide Financial over Data Theft

Customers of Countrywide Financial have filed a class-action lawsuit over the 2008 data breach that enabled company insiders to steal and sell their personal information. According to a Courthouse News Service report, the class-action lawsuit on behalf of 16 plaintiffs seeks $20 million in damages, plus punitive damages. The data theft, originally attributed to a single employee working over a two-year-period, exposed data on tens of thousands of customer records. The lawsuit alleges that Countrywide Financial employees stole and sold “tens of thousands, or millions” of customers’ personal financial information, according to the news report. The suit claims the defendants do not dispute that customers’ private financial information was disseminated. It seeks to find out “whether the dissemination was intended as a plan or scheme, or was intentional; [and] whether any of the defendants was simply aiding and abetting, rather than an architect of the plan to disseminate the personal information.”