The Milwaukee Bucks have found themselves in the middle of one of the more strange stories within the NBA. The team has fallen victim to an online scam, seeing them release the financial data of team employees, including players, to the scammer, as reported by Shams Charania of the Vertical.
The scam involved an e-mail in which someone impersonated team president Peter Feigin. A team employee then sent 2015 IRS W-2 documents to the scammer. The original e-mail was sent on April 26 but the Bucks did not discover that it was a scam until May 16.
The data included names, addresses, social security numbers, and dates of birth. The team has since involved the IRS and FBI who are investigating the issue.
The Bucks released the following statement regarding the breach of security:
“We take this incident, and the privacy and security of our employees, very seriously. We immediately launched an investigation, which is aggressive and ongoing. We quickly notified impacted individuals and are arranging for these individuals to have access to three years of credit monitoring and non-expiring identity restoration services.
“We believe this incident arose as a result of human error, and are providing additional privacy training to our staff and implementing additional preventative measures.”
This is obviously a strange situation. It’s not often that a multi-million (if not billion) dollar franchise falls victim to such a simple scam. This will certainly have negative effects on how the Bucks are viewed by the rest of the league, including players, especially if anyone is severely affected by losing their financial data.
