Call Kurtis Investigates: AT&T Customer Says She's Getting Other Customers' Emails
ROCKLIN (CBS13) — A Rocklin viewer says she's been barraged with emails containing personal information of other customers for months now and wants it to stop.
Carol Jans said she received emails that appeared to be from AT&T with other people's account numbers, temporary passwords, and payment information to her personal Gmail inbox.
Jans says, "A hundred and seventeen came in on one day."
She says she reported the issue to AT&T, but the emails just kept coming.
"How would they get my email on all these accounts," said Jans.
The emails contained small nuggets of information with some customer account numbers, user ID's, temporary passwords, service dates and even some with partial credit card numbers.
"It's a lot of personal information I don't want," said Jans.
She is sure these other customers do not realize she's getting their emails that are only meant for them.
Jans says after three months after reporting it to an AT&T customer service representative; they were still coming.
She said when she talked to them about it, their answer was, "'We don't know what's going on.'"
When we asked AT&T, they could not tell us either.
We wanted to know what could the bad guys do with the information Jans received, fell into the wrong hands.
Security expert, Robert Siciliano with Hotspot Shield compares the limited customer data in these emails to puzzle pieces.
"Unquestionably little bits of data, little breadcrumbs can essentially add up to a loaf of bread," said Siciliano.
He says the bad guys are putting information like this into databases creating a full picture.
"A full comprehensive identity that ultimately can be used for various forms of fraud," said Siciliano.
After days of pressing AT&T for answers, the company sent us a statement, saying, "Protecting customer information is a top priority. We are quickly working to fix this issue isolated to this email address and will contact customers if any of their information was inadvertently shared."
Jans worries that if she is getting emails meant for others, who is getting her emails.
"I just want it fixed," she said.
As of late this afternoon, AT&T said the issue had been fixed.
AT&T has yet to answer a list of questions we sent them, only to reply saying they are satisfied with the statement they shared.
We attempted to get ahold of the folks for whom these emails were intended, but never got a response.
At this point, we still do not know why Jans was getting these emails.