Employee tried to sell data of 1.5 million customers

Jun 20, 2016 12:22 GMT  ·  By

An employee of T-Mobile's Czech branch stole customer data and then tried to sell it to a third-party, Czech news site iDNES reports.

The incident came to light on Monday, June 13, last week, and the company issued a statement later during the same day.

T-Mobile said that its security systems detected the employee's actions, and they reported the incident to the police.

Employee stole data from 1.5 million customers

The employee managed to steal data from 1.5 million customers and later tried to sell to a third-party, only to be apprehended by authorities.

T-Mobile explains they fired the employee, and police are now pursuing an investigation into the incident.

The company assured customers that the employee did not manage to get his hands on passwords or PII (Personally Identifiable Information), managing to steal only customer information meant for marketing campaigns. The company says the worst-case scenario is for its clients to receive an increased amount of spam.

Additionally, the company adds the data theft had nothing to do with a signal failure incident that occurred on April 19. These two incidents are unrelated, and T-Mobile says a connection between the two is absolutely excluded.

T-Mobile: A failure of an individual and not a system

"Therefore, this is a case of a failure of an individual and not a system or procedural failure," a T-Mobile spokesperson stated last week. "Thanks to our robust security mechanisms, we were able to respond immediately and secure the database, which had a purely marketing nature; it did not contain any location or traffic data or sensitive data such as passwords."

T-Mobile Czech Republic, part of the Deutsche Telekom group, is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and the company is the country's leading mobile provider.

Last year, T-Mobile USA announced that data for 15 million of its customers was compromised. Experian, a third-party vendor that processed the company's credit applications, was hacked and lost a copy of the T-Mobile user data.