Background, GenevaLunch
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, cleared up some of the confusion that has surrounded the 2008 theft of client data from its Geneva bank and apologized to its current customers at a press conference in Geneva Thursday morning 11 March. A total of 15,000 current clients, slightly less than one-fifth of its customer base of 100,000 clients in Switzerland, were affected when French employee Hervé Falciani, an IT employee, stole data over a period of several months during 2006-08, the bank acknowledged. It noted that the extent of the theft was shown to it only 3 March, a week ago, when the Swiss Federal Prosecutor gave it copies of “a substantal portion” of the stolen data. HSBC says it is now “actively contacting” clients to apologize.
Data was also stolen on additional 9,000 clients’ who have left the bank, bringing to 24,000 the total number touched by the theft. Many of those who left did not have large enough amounts to warrant a wealth management account.
HSBC victim of data theft
Update 21:15 (last paragraph) Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The French authorities have responded favourably to Switzerland’s demand to return the data stolen by a former employee of HSBC Private Bank in Geneva, reportedly amounting to 130,000 client names. French Ministry of Justice officials confirmed that the stolen laptop was to be returned “very quickly”.
The encrypted client data, taken from the bank by former IT employee Hervé Falciani, was turned over to the French public prosecutor’s office in Nice, where investigations were opened into French clients of the bank suspected of money-laundering. Switzerland had asked the French authorities for judicial assistance earlier this year when Falciani was found to have stolen the data and moved to France. As part of the cross-border cooperation, Swiss authorities supplied the French with the means to decipher the data on the laptop.
