Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports -- a virtual one-stop shop for fraud and identity theft -- with data on consumers in affluent neighborhoods across the country. . . .
Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports -- a virtual one-stop shop for fraud and identity theft -- with data on consumers in affluent neighborhoods across the country.

The company said in a letter to the victims that computer intruders used an authorization code from Ford Credit to get the credit reports from Experian, one of three major reporting agencies.

"I've never seen anything of this size," a spokesman for Experian, Donald Girard, said. "Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust factor."

The inquiries gave the intruders access to each victim's personal and financial information, including address, Social Security number, bank and credit card accounts and ratings of creditworthiness, which can be used to identify the best targets.

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