German Christmas cake theft sparks data scare

FRANKFURT, Dec 20, 2008 (AFP)

A German uproar over another suspected case of stolen personal data was resolved when police determined it was in fact the result of a hijacked Christmas cake. The mystery began when two sub contractors for a package delivery company pinched a "Stollen," or traditional German cake, that a company in Stuttgart wanted to send to the editor in chief of the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

To hide the theft, the pair replaced the cake with another package, which was being shipped by a company that handles sensitive computer data to the Berliner regional bank LBB, police said.

When the newspaper got the details of banking transactions of thousands of LBB clients, it notified prosecutors in Frankfurt and broke the story in what appeared to be another case of waylaid personal data in Germany.

Two weeks earlier the magazine Wirtschaftswoche had reported that banking information of 21 million Germans was available under the counter for 12 million euros (17 million dollars).

In October, the historic telecommunications operator Deutsche Telekom was forced to recognize that data from 17 million clients had been stolen and that that of 30 million had been posted by mistake for two days on an Internet site. On December 10, the German government drafted a law intended to reinforce the protection of personal data.