By WMBD TV

MCLEAN COUNTY – A Florida couple claims State Farm was negligent and violated their privacy by not preventing a data breach this summer that led to the theft of 400 million records that contained personal information.

The suit, originally filed in McLean County Circuit Court in September but moved to U.S. District in Peoria two weeks ago, claims the Bloomington-based insurance giant “breached its duties to class members by, among other things, failing to implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices to protect the Personal Information entrusted to it from unauthorized access and disclosure.”

A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of all people who had their information hacked, the 33-page suit seeks unspecific damages regarding claims of negligence, invasion of privacy and breaching the company’s fiduciary duty among other things.

The data included health information, addresses, phone numbers and financial information, the suit alleges.

A call to the Scotts’ Minneapolis-based attorneys was not returned.

In an Oct. 18 filing where State Farm asked to move the case from state court to federal court, the company said it “denies the allegations in the complaint, which are factually and legally
baseless.”

State Farm wanted to move the case, which isn’t uncommon, for a variety of reasons including that it’s a class action suit, that a possible payout could be in the tens of millions of dollars and that the case crosses state lines.

The amount of people who were affected is staggering. State Farm wrote in a court filing that even “if some customers had multiple entries — e.g., a customer had more than one insurance policy — a conservative extrapolation from that data is 25,011,429 customers with records affected by the alleged data breach.”

WMBD can be reached at [email protected].