Identity thieves claim to have stolen the details of 21 million German bank accounts, and will sell to the nearest bidder. Starting price: EURO 12 million.

The cyber criminals proved that they have the details by producing a CD that contained the names, addresses, birthdays, account numbers, and bank routing numbers and phone numbers of 1.2 million accounts. Fraudsters with this kind of information could rack up a huge amount of spending before being noticed by the victim.

The crime was reported by German magazine reporters, writing for WirtschaftsWoche, who claim to have obtained the CD from the criminals after a face to face meeting with two people claiming to be involved in the theft. The journalists pretended to be buyers who worked for a gambling house.

“We took away with us the first delivery, a CD with 1.2 million accounts, that we couldn’t imagine,” said one of the editors looking into the case. “In the worst case, three out of four German households would have to be afraid that some money could be taken from their checking account without their authorisation, and perhaps even without their realising it,” the magazine warned.

The magazine reckons that the information was obtained from call centre employees and is the second massive security breech in Germany in the last 2 months. In October, mobile operator T-Mobile admitted that it had lost the private details of 17 million customers that included names, addresses, DOB’s, Phone numbers and even email addresses.

A government official, Peter Schaar, said that this should serve as a “wake up call” to companies who hold vast amounts of data.

“It is essential that personal data cannot be transmitted with the individual’s explicit agreement,” he told ZDF television.

The details could be sold for as much as $1000 per record, said Avivah Litan, and analyst with Gartner Research. “Without a doubt, bank accounts yield the highest value in the black market,” she said.

She was shocked to hear that Germany was the victim of two crimes in as many months.

“You’d think Germany would have some of the tightest controls around bank account data,” Litan said. “Europe has very strong privacy laws and Germany is one of the biggest enforcers of those privacy laws. So I think the fact that this data was available on the German black market shows how far the criminals have gone.”

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