FCC Steps Up Data Enforcement Role With $25 Million Fine

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced yesterday that it has entered into a settlement with AT&T Services, Inc. as a result of the FCC's investigation of a series of data breaches during 2013 and 2014 at AT&T call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines. As part of the settlement, AT&T must pay a $25 million civil money penalty — the largest ever imposed by the FCC for data privacy and security concerns — provide data breach notification to affected customers and offer those customers credit monitoring services.

The data breaches involved over 40 employees who stole sensitive personal information from almost 300,000 AT&T customer accounts and sold that information to third parties who later committed fraud with the information.