Alacrity Solutions Group Data Breach Class Action

Every week brings more news of data breaches. This class action alleges that Alacrity Solutions Group, LLC (ASG) did not exercise reasonable care in trying to safeguard its clients’ personally identifiable information (PII), resulting in a data breach in or around March 2021. The complaint also faults ASG for not informing the individual victims until more than a year after the data breach occurred.

The Nationwide Class for this action is all persons nationwide whose private information was compromised in the data breach discovered on or around March 2021, and who were sent a notice of the data breach. A Texas Subclass has also been defined, for all those in the above class living in Texas.

ASG administers insurance claims for various companies. In this role, it obtains significant amounts of private information on the customers of its customers.

Disturbingly, the plaintiff in this case, Aldreamer Smith does not know the nature of her connection to ASG: “Plaintiff Smith maintains car and renter’s insurance for her home, but it unsure how Alacrity Solutions would have obtained her Private Information.”

Nevertheless, she received a notice of the “security incident” to inform her that her name and Social Security number had been compromised.

The notice, as quoted in the complaint, said that ASG had seen suspicious activity in its system on March 3, 2021. It engaged third-party forensics specialists to investigate: “This investigation determined that certain files on Alacrity Solutions’ systems could have been subject to unauthorized access and/or acquisition between March 1 and March 3, 2021, but not confirm which specific data was impacted.” ASG’s investigation then continued until sometime in February 2022.

According to the complaint, notices were not sent out until April 2022.

The notice offered victims a year’s worth of credit monitoring from Equifax, but the complaint notes that that was “ineffective” for Smith: “In order to receive the free credit monitoring services, Plaintiff Smith would have had to share additional sensitive private information with third parties connected to ASG.”

The complaint alleges, “In maintaining Plaintiff Smith’s Private Information, [ASG] expressly and impliedly promised to safeguard Plaintiff Smith’s PII.” However, the complaint claims, it did not take adequate measures to do so.

According to the complaint, ASG did not comply with the security guidelines for information set forth by the Federal Trade Commission.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Exposing Private Information, Exposure to cyber crime, Your Privacy