60 employees seeking answers from Mercedes dealership over ‘worrying and avoidable’ data breach

A group of more than 60 employees and former workers at a Mercedes dealership with outlets in the Midlands, Greater Manchester and the North West have contacted specialist data breach lawyers to help them find out how their personal data was accessed in a serious security breach.

The group have requested support from experts at law firm Hayes Connor to establish what has happened to their data after being contacted by letter by car sales business LSH Auto at the beginning of last month.

The Mercedes dealership is believed to have written to all of its current and former employees to warn them that the business had suffered a ‘security incident’ which ‘may have resulted in unauthorised access to your personal data”.

The letter from LSH Auto to all of its employees said that the firm’s IT security was compromised on June 3 by a cyber attack by ‘unknown and unauthorised individual(s)’.

Experts at Hayes Connor, which specialises in cyber attacks and data breach incidents, say hundreds of other people could have been affected by the incident and the firm’s specialists are now seeking answers from LSH Auto as to what has happened and why.

Jon Else, a Director at Hayes Connor, said data breaches caused significant distress to people whose information has been exposed, adding: “We’re being contacted daily by more and more people who’ve received this letter and are now having sleepless nights worrying what this means.

“Incidents like this are worrying and avoidable and LSH Auto needs to let everyone affected know as soon as possible what information has been affected and what the risks to each person are.

“It’s been more than a month since LSH Auto’s letter was sent and their employees are no closer to finding out what’s happened and why. They now owe each and every person affected an explanation and to explain what they intend to do for them.”

Jon added: “They can also assure the people affected that this sort of incident won’t happen again and say what steps they have taken to protect everyone’s data for the future.”

“The very least you can expect from a current or former employer is that your private, highly personal information is kept safe but sadly, we are seeing more and more of these cases and it’s a real concern for the people affected.”

LSH Auto operates from a number of sites in the North West and the Midlands, including Stockport, Bury, Macclesfield, Birmingham and Tamworth.

Hayes Connor was one of the first law firms in the UK to specialise in data protection law and data breach claims and has one of the largest teams of data breach experts in the country. It acts for clients on individual data breaches and also where the private information of a group of people has been compromised as part of a targeted attack or a large scale data breach.