West Virginia Bank Trade Secrets Case

From The Dominion Post of Morgantown, W.Va., via the Charleston Daily Mail online, a story about a lawsuit filed by Huntington National Bank claiming that six former employees stole more than 2,000 customer records before they quit to go work for competitor bank MVB Bank of Morganton.

Huntington filed the lawsuit in federal court against a former vice president and other mortgage department employees who are alleged to have committed a "brazen and egregious theft of trade secrets."

According to the story, Huntington claims that the defendants spent weeks leading up to their resignations downloading and printing confidential customer records from the bank's secure database -- records they then used to solicit Huntington's existing and prospective customers.

"These customer records did not merely include customer names, addresses and telephone numbers," the lawsuit said. "In addition, the defendants took with them what is presently known to be over 2,000 customer Social Security numbers, dates of birth, bank account numbers, and other highly confidential, personal information of Huntington's customers, the unwitting victims of this theft."

The story goes on to say that Huntington discovered the alleged theft April 19 when a few customers called to ask why MVB was contacting them about the loans they had applied for at Huntington.

Sadly typical, as we know.