Notified of Data Theft That Included My Personal Information

Yesterday (Wednesday, January 25th) I received a letter from AmeriPrise (formerly American Express Financial Advisers (AEFA)) that my personal information was included on a laptop stolen from an employee in December.

I was a financial adviser in 2004 before the company was divested by American Express and my noncompete agreement ended in mid-December 2005.

AmeriPrise is offering a free year of credit monitoring and the story is making worldwide news today.

So I now I know that the situation is worse than anticipated.

One piece of news given between the lines on Yahoo! is :

Ameriprise said it has alerted 68,000 current and former financial advisers whose names and

Social Security numbers were also stored on the same computer. About 158,000 clients had only their names and internal account numbers exposed. The company says it has more than 2 million customers and about 10,500 current financial advisers.

This means that there are 57,500 former financial advisers whose information was stolen.  The AEFA attrition rate is deplorable and I knew weeks before leaving AEFA that it would be put up for sale or on the chopping block altogether.

But Yahoo! did not include the same news that Reuters is reporting that the only reason that the information was contained on the laptop in the first place is that the clients were transferred to new financial advisers when the former financial advisers left the company.

This is clearly a case of reaping what you sow for AmeriPrise.  First you lose the brand of American Express, the logo, the ability to contact card-carrying AMEX customers, and now you further alienate the customers whose trust was gained by the former advisers by monitoring them and/or the former financial advisers to see if any non compete agreements were violated.

There was no commitment to both the financial adviser and/or the niche markets that have gone traditionally under served in my opinion.  Even home office personnel responsible or that should have known if such resources were available did not have a clue.

When I left the company after receiving some supposed advice that was either unethical or possibly illegal (since it clearly violated any company's implied or expressed code of conduct) I knew that if it was the best advice that could be offered, then my ladder was clearly leaning against the wrong building.

The end result would be the same regardless of the choice made so I chose to leave versus being forced out otherwise.

I now have to make the telephone call to former clients whose phone numbers I may have (to rediscover or relocate) to apologize for putting them in a situation that I never imagined.

The worst part of the handwriting on the wall was that the company expressed that it owned the relationships with the client above all when flesh and blood had established the relationships in the first place .  This is the reason that I did not or could not contact anyone while the non compete agreement was in effect.

I did not want to take the risk of making such a jealous company angry.

Now that the cat is officially out of the bag for worldwide viewing, my loyalty is completely disintegrated.

The moral of this story is to more heavily screen companies that you work for since they are already screening you.