Critical American Express Card Stolen By Employee, Little Info Available

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 12, 12:00PM EST

American Express (AXP) has informed a number of its card members that their account numbers, names, the date on which their cards became effective, and the expiration dates have been stolen. The firm also said that the employee who took the data has been arrested and that an investigation is ongoing. American Express stated that social security numbers and national identification numbers were not taken.

The Ponemon Institute recently named American Express “Most Trusted Company for Privacy” for the fifth consecutive year. American Express also ranked highest in customer satisfaction among credit card companies in a recent JD Power survey.

Whan asked how many card members were effected, a American Express spokesman said that it was a relatively small percentage of the firm’s customer base. The company had approximately 88 million cardholders worldwide at the end of 2009. That makes the term “relatively small” mean very little.

Among the things that American Express did not disclose in it letter to card members is when the data was stolen. The company also did not say whether all of the data was retrieved or fell into the hands of third parties. There is no mention in the letter of whether any of the card members whose data was taken have had charges on their cards.

In other words, American Express has said as little about the incident as possible.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.