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Tapes on Marriott Vacation Club customers missing(Orlando Sentinel, The (FL) (KRT)) ORLANDO, Fla. _ Computer tapes have gone missing from Marriott Vacation Club International's Orlando headquarters, the company said Tuesday, with information on 206,000 employees, time-share owners and customers that could be misused by credit thieves. "We regret this situation has occurred and realize this may cause concern for our associates and customers," Marriott Vacation Club President Stephen P. Weisz said in a written statement. Ed Kinney, a spokesman for the time-share giant, said the tapes contain people's addresses, Social Security numbers "and other sensitive information." Employees and time-share customers are being alerted by mail, the company said, and will be offered an opportunity to enroll in a credit-monitoring service at no cost to them. Kinney, vice president of corporate affairs and brand awareness, said the company has no idea how the backup tapes disappeared but has alerted authorities and is conducting an internal investigation. "It's not really readily usable information. You do need certain hardware to be able to read it," Kinney said of the tapes. Marriott has established a toll-free number for employees and customers seeking additional information: 1-800-952-8145. Time-share owners at one of the company's local resorts, the Marriott Grande Vista near SeaWorld, said Tuesday they were not aware of the security breach. The vacationers, none of whom was willing to be quoted by name, said they weren't surprised to learn of the missing tapes, given recent reports of similar incidents at other large corporations. "You always have to have concerns" when dealing with people's personal financial information, said one visitor from Chicago. A number of large banks and credit card companies have had problems this year with missing data tapes or computer hackers stealing customer information. In June, MasterCard disclosed that a security breach at an Atlanta-based transaction-processing company had exposed as many as 40 million credit card accounts to credit theft and related types of fraud. That same month, the consumer-finance division of Citigroup Inc. began notifying some 3.9 million U.S. customers that computer tapes containing information about their accounts had been lost. In February, Bank of America Corp. disclosed that it had lost computer tapes containing personal information on 1.2 million federal employees, including some members of the U.S. Senate. Privacy experts recommend that people be vigilant in checking credit card bills and regularly reviewing their credit records for any signs of misuse _ whether they know of a specific security breach or not. Representatives of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego and the National Consumer Law Center in Washington, D.C., were unavailable Tuesday to comment on the missing Marriott data. Marriott Vacation Club is the nation's time-share sales leader, with more than $1.46 billion a year in sales and 52 resorts nationwide. It is a division of Washington, D.C.-based Marriott International Inc. ___ (c) 2005, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.). Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail [email protected]. |