A Louisville accounting firm’s laptop with names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of most E.On U.S. employees and some retirees was stolen last month in Chicago, according to letters to potential victims from E.On and the accounting firm.
Mountjoy & Bressler, the accounting firm, and E.On sent letters to potential identity theft victims about a week after the July 20 theft of the computer, which contained 2005 data. The data did not include addresses.
Chip Keeling, an E.On spokesman, said the company is not disclosing how many names of employees and retirees were included in the data because of an ongoing police investigation. The theft appears to be random and the company does not want to give thieves an incentive to hunt for the information, Keeling said.
E.On-U.S. had about 3,000 employees at the end of 2005.
No customer data was stolen, Keeling said.
Keeling said E.ON employees were notified last week on the same day the company found out. The letters followed that notification, he said.
Both companies said in their letters that the computer had security features that would make the data difficult to retrieve and that there have been no signs of misuse of any of the data.