Capital One Class Action Filed Over Data Breach

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Capital One in response to a data breach that affected around 106 million customers and applicants.

Plaintiff Kevin Zosiak says that Capital One did not protect the confidential information of customers and small businesses.  Confidential information includes financial information and/or personal information.

The Capital One class action lawsuit states that on July 29th, 2019, the bank publicly announced that customer confidential information had been accessed by an unauthorized individual.  The company stated that personal information of customers and small business was stolen from those who applied for credit cards between 2005 and 2019.

The Capital One class action lawsuit says that around 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers were revealed.

CNN reports that Paige Thompson is the one accused of the data breach and a criminal complaint has been filed against her.

“Defendants only discovered the Data Breach after an individual previously unknown to Capital One sent the following email to Capital One providing a link to a file containing the leaked Sensitive Information. The file provided in the link, which was timestamped April 21, 2019, also contained code for commands used in the intrusion, as well as a list of more than 700 folders or buckets of data,” the data breach class action lawsuit notes.

The plaintiff claims that Capital One assures customers that it sensitive information will be kept confidential, stating that they use 256-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology.  The Capital One class action lawsuit states that this means that data transferred between the bank and the customer is not able to be viewed by another party.

“Defendants’ data security obligations and promises were particularly important given the substantial increase in data breaches, which were widely known to the public and to anyone in Defendants’ industries,” the Capital One class action lawsuit says.

The plaintiff points to a data breach that Capital One had to deal with in January 2018 as well as a June 2007 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about identity theft as proof that the bank had warnings that a breach was possible.

The Capital One class action lawsuit also argues that victims of identity theft spend numerous hours and a lot of money to repair their credit after a data breach and that those who steal personal information use this material for crimes which include “credit card fraud, phone or utilities fraud, and/or bank/finance fraud.”

The Capital One class action complaint also states that sensitive information is “a valuable commodity to identity thieves that once the information has been compromised, criminals often trade the information on the “cyber black-market” for years.”

The plaintiff has filed claims of negligence, negligence per se, violations of Section 5 of the FTC Act, and breach of implied contract.

Class Members include: “All persons in the United States whose Sensitive Information was maintained on the servers of Capital One and the cloud computing company used by Capital One that were compromised as a result of the breach announced by Capital One on or around July 29, 2019.”

The plaintiff is represented by Linda P. Nussbaum and Bart D. Cohen of Nussbaum Law Group P.C. and Adam Frankel of Greenwich Legal Associates LLC.

The Capital One Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit is Zosiak v. Capitol One Financial Corporation, et al., Case No.1:19-cv-02265, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

If you believe you are a victim of the Capital One Data Breach, submit your information for the TCA US & Canada Capital One Data Breach Investigation.

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