Talk about a walking embarrassment, some soon-to-be fired Milwaukee Bucks employee is about as close to the description as anyone I’ve ever heard of after the idiotic move that happened today.
According to Yahoo! Sports‘ Shams Charania, the employee fell for an email scam that resulted in the scammer receiving addresses, social security numbers, and compensation figures for all the players on the Bucks’ roster.
In an email sent to Milwaukee players on Wednesday night, the franchise termed the issue as a “serious security incident” and took responsibility for an employee distributing 2015 IRS W-2 documents in an email scam in which team president Peter Feigin was impersonated, sources said.
The W-2 information included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, compensation information and dates of birth. An unknown party requested the private documents on April 26, and the Bucks ultimately discovered on May 16 that the financial forms were sent to a spoof hacker, according to the email sent to players.
In the correspondence, the Bucks said they were notifying the IRS and FBI about the incident.
So what you’re telling me is that some hacker has pretty much everything he or she needs to get into millionaire athletes’ bank accounts with little resistance? Sounds like a serious problem to me.
My favorite part of the whole story comes from a person within in the organization who said, “We believe this incident arose as a result of human error, and are providing additional privacy training to our staff and implementing additional preventative measures.” In other words, the “additional preventative measures” means firing the jackass who made the mistake and bringing in someone smarter who won’t compromise the personal identity of the entire Bucks roster.