Thousands of documents containing the names, addresses, credit card details, telephone numbers and the signatures of guests at one of Britain's most famous hotels ended up in a rubbish skip in what has been dubbed "the biggest field day for identity fraudsters ever".
The owner of the Grand Hotel in Brighton was forced to issue an apology after staff threw out huge quantities of registration forms and credit card slips that included the details of several politicians.
The Information Commissioner's Office believes the hotel violated the Data Protection Act, while several members of parliament said they would raise the issue in parliament to determine if consumers needed further safeguards to protect them from negligent companies.
The 200-room Grand is famous in Britain for hosting regular political meetings and party conferences. It was namely the Grand Hotel where the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher was injured in a 1984 IRA bomb attack.
Brighton residents were amazed to see a skip full of registration cards of guests who stayed at the hotel between 1998 and 2000 lying in a skip near the city centre hotel. The cards listed the name, company, home address and credit card number in full and most included a home phone number, and in the case of some foreign guests, passport numbers. The cards were left unattended in the street for 24 hours before being removed by a local refuse firm.
Experts pointed out that most credit cards issued in the period 1998-2000 had most probably already expired, though many people will still have cards bearing the same number.
Every year in Britain 120,000 people fall victim to identity theft, according to the UK fraud prevention service CIFAS. A government study in 2002 revealed that this type of crime cost the country 1.3 billion pounds a year, though experts maintain that the figures for 2004 and 2005 are much higher.
“This is an unprecedented incident — the staff at the Grand Hotel were extremely negligent. Anyone connected in the slightest way to the use or storage of private data should know just how sensitive it is. If the hotel had to get rid of unneeded piles of paper, it should have been destroyed in a shredder. And in that way money could also have been saved on the use of the rubbish skip," believes Denis Zenkin, marketing director at InfoWatch.
Source: Guardian
