Volkswagen announced that an unauthorized third party obtained personal information of over 3 million American customers, virtually all current or potential customers of Audi, the luxury car brand owned by the Volkswagen Group. A majority of the information obtained included phone numbers, email addresses, and postal mailing addresses. Volkswagen reached out to 90,000 customers and prospective buyers who had very sensitive data impacted. Driver’s license numbers accounted for more than 95 percent of the 90,000 that were contacted. The small, remaining number of records included dates of birth, Social Security Numbers and Volkswagen or Audi account numbers. The data was gathered for sales and marketing between 2014 and 2019. Volkswagen believes the data was breached at some time between August 2019 and May of this year.

What This Means

When a site is breached, your personal information can be accessed by hackers and can be made publicly available on the internet. Any information of a person has a chance to be exposed, no matter how secure the site can be.

How to Protect Yourself

There is no guaranteed way to prevent identity theft, however, there are certain actions you can take to protect yourself and limit your risk. Change all your passwords periodically, check your credit card and bank statements consistently, and use a credit monitoring service. Use these precautionary steps to reduce your risk of identity theft and follow us on social media for future data breach alerts.

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