Extortion in the Health Care System

November 9, 2008 – 4:07 pm

One of the largest pharmacy prescription processors announced Thursday that it’s being threatened by extortionist and if they don’t meet their payment demands the extortionist are going to release the information of millions of Americans.

Express Scripts received the letter in October from the extortionists. 75 customers personal information including names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and for some of the customers prescription data were included in the letter. The extortionists demanded money and in return they would not expose the data. Express Scripts did not release how much money the extortionists were asking for.

Express Scripts are not planning on paying the some of money to the criminals. Instead they are working with the FBI to try and discover who is responsible for the data breach. The company is still trying to figure out how the data was stolen in the first place. They know where the information came from based on the information from the letter.

The scary fact about data extortion is that it’s more common than people think. Most extortion incidents never make it into mainstream news because the companies just settle and pay the money asked. Thousands of companies have had their information stolen and have just paid off the extortionist. Unfortunately, when it comes to the extortion of data you never really know what they are going to do with it. They could just copy the data or sell it anyway even after you’ve paid them.

LifeLock is the leader in identity theft protection. They can help prevent identity thieves from using your personal data and doing harm to your credit. There are only two ways to prevent an identity theft. One would be to never lose or have any personal information stolen. The other would be to prevent the thieves from being able to use your information. If you have read as many identity theft articles as I have you would believe that it’s virtually impossible to prevent your information from being stolen. LifeLock can’t prevent the thief from getting your information, but they can help prevent them from using it. Rendering the information that they stole useless. LifeLock can help prevent someone from stealing your identity and your money. If you would like a discount on a LifeLock membership use our LifeLock Promotion code, Defense. Fraud

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