Milwaukee Bucks accidentally give up players personal information in phishing scam

The Milwaukee Bucks reportedly were the victim of a phishing scam and gave up the personal information of their players.

The Milwaukee Bucks urgently e-mailed players Wednesday night after a staffer accidentally gave up player’s personal and financial information as part of a phishing scam, Shams Charania of The Vertical reports.

The source told Charania that someone posed as Milwaukee Bucks president Peter Feigin in an apparent e-mail scam to obtain players’ personal information, including W-2 tax forms, social security numbers and other payment information. The information was reportedly given up in April and the team just discovered the potential problem and notified players, advising them of a “serious security threat.”

The Bucks are now working with the NBA and NBPA to investigate the breach and have contacted the FBI and IRS to alert them to the fraud.

Players are not happy to say the least. And they are not happy with the communication from the Bucks at this stage as to how this information was compromised.

"“The communication received on this major security breach is unacceptable,” one agent with a client on the Bucks told The Vertical. “The players need to know the exact measures being taken by the Bucks and the FBI to ensure each and every player’s identity and financial information will not be compromised. There needs to be accountability for such a mistake, details on the steps taken to rectify it and a process put in place to make sure this never happens again.”"

The Bucks have given each person compromised two years of credit monitoring, but this is a serious deal for a number of reasons.

Everyone deals with e-mail scams and the potential their information could be given up. There is a lot of trust put in corporations to keep this information secure and away from those who would use it illicitly.

But these are multimillionaires in a million-dollar business. This e-mail scam seemed specifically targeted at a NBA team. And someone took the bait and compromised a lot of people’s money and information.

That could make things worse for the Bucks too as they try to improve their team in free agency. This now becomes a major embarrassment for the franchise and something they will have to answer to every single player that even considers the Bucks down the road.

The important thing now for Milwaukee is damage control. The team has to get to the bottom of how this happened and make sure it does not happen again.

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