Banking giant Wells Fargo suffers data breach, sends two notification letters

American multinational bank Wells Fargo has informed two of its customers about a data breach.

The personal information involved includes names of clients and mortgage account numbers.

The financial services company claims to be responsible for safeguarding customer information and promptly responded to the incident as it arose.

It’s not yet clear when the attack took place and for how long unauthorized individuals may have had access to this sensitive information.

However, in the notification breach letter, the company states that “Wells Fargo took appropriate actions with respect to the employee in accordance with our policies and procedures.”

Following the Cybernews inquiry, a Wells Fargo spokesperson sent us the following comment: “Wells Fargo was not involved in a cyber-attack. An employee violated company policy for sending information to his personal account. The individual is no longer employed with Wells Fargo. Two customers are receiving a data breach notification letter. The needs of our customers are at the center of everything we do, and we regret any inconvenience this may cause.”

In the breach notification letter, the banking giant claims to be “taking measures to monitor (customer) account(s) for suspicious events or changes, and is continually reviewing security measures to reduce the likelihood of this happening in the future”.

Wells Fargo has 70 million customers worldwide and operates in 35 different countries across the globe.

The organization is one of the Big Four Banks in the United States, a name given to financial institutions that dominate the industry. Other banks in this category include JPMorgan, Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup.

This isn’t the first time that one of the Big Four Banks of North America has had the personal information of its clients exposed.

The Bank of America suffered a third-party breach back in February 2024, which revealed a multitude of personal information about thousands of customers. The information exposed includes names, addresses, business emails, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and other account information.

Updated on April 9th [08:50 a.m. GMT] with a statement from Wells Fargo. Updates throughout the article to reflect the scale of the incident.