Four computers containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of Wells Fargo & Co. borrowers were stolen last month. It was the third such security breach in a year.
The San Francisco bank told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that the thefts occurred in early October from the Atlanta office of Regulus Integrated Solutions, a company with headquarters in Napa, Calif., that handles billing for banks.
The computer files included the names, addresses, loan numbers and Social Security numbers of customers with student loans and mortgage escrow accounts, according to Wells Fargo spokeswoman Julia Tunis.
Identity thieves frequently use Social Security and loan numbers, but Tunis said that there was no indication so far that the stolen customer information had been misused.
She said a "relatively small percentage" of Wells' 4.9 million mortgage customers and 890,000 student-loan borrowers were affected but declined to be more specific about the number of victims or about the circumstances surrounding the theft.
Wells Fargo, the largest bank based in California, is a "longtime customer" of Regulus, Tunis said. Regulus executives declined to comment.
It was unclear whether any of the stolen computers held information about people who bank at institutions other than Wells Fargo. The Gwinnett County Police Department in suburban Atlanta is investigating the thefts.
Regulus, founded in 1995, is one of the largest U.S. companies focusing on billing and money transfers, with 2,700 employees and 4,000 clients, according to its Web site.
As required by a California law that took effect last year, Wells notified affected customers in letters sent out last week. Tunis said they lived throughout the nation but were concentrated in the Western and Midwestern states where Wells has full-service bank branches.
The letters were the third batch Wells has had to send out in 12 months to notify customers that financial secrets were compromised, each time as the result of stolen computers. Last November, a burglar stole a laptop from the office of a marketing consultant working for Wells. The laptop contained names, addresses and account and Social Security numbers for thousands of customers who had taken out personal lines of credit, police said.
The second theft occurred in the St. Louis suburb of Edmundson in February, when a rented car was stolen from two Wells Fargo Home Mortgage employees. A laptop containing information on thousands of borrowers was missing when the car was found a week later.
Police said there were no reports of fraudulent use of the information on those computers.
In the most recent letters, Wells advised customers to file what's known as a "security alert" with the three major credit bureaus, asking them to increase their scrutiny of activity in the customers' names. That would make it easier for the agencies to detect fraud.
The bank isn't permitted to contact the credit bureaus directly, Tunis said. But she said Wells Fargo offered the customers a free year of credit monitoring, a kind of early-warning system for identity theft.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
