WASHINGTON—AT&T has been fined $25 million by the Federal Communications Commission after call center employees in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines were found to have accessed personally identifiable information from some 278,000 customer accounts without authorization.
The info was accessed during 2013 and 2014 and was provided to help unlock AT&T mobile phones.
According to the FCC, the company’s employees provided the information to unauthorized third parties who appear to have trafficked in stolen cell phones or secondary market phones that they wanted to unlock. The $25-million civil penalty is the largest privacy and data security enforcement ever by the FCC.