Ten U.S. states have sent a letter to Anthem complaining that the company has been too slow in notifying consumers that they were victims of a massive data breach disclosed last week.
“The delay in notifying those impacted is unreasonable and is causing unnecessary added worry to an already concerned population of Anthem customers,” said the letter, which was sent on Tuesday by Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen on behalf of Connecticut and nine other states.
The letter asked the No. 2 U.S. health insurer to compensate any consumers who are victims of scams, if the fraud occurs before Anthem notifies them of the breach and offers them free credit monitoring.
“Anthem must commit to reimbursing consumers for any losses associated with this breach during the time period between the breach and the date that the company provides access to credit and identity theft safeguards,” said the letter.
Jepsen also asked Anthem to contact his office by Wednesday afternoon with details of its plans to “provide adequate protections” to consumers whose data was exposed in this breach.
The letter was written on behalf of Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
Representatives with Anthem could not immediately be reached for comment.
Anthem disclosed the massive breach last week, saying that hackers accessed a database of some 80 million consumers and employees that contained Social Security numbers and other sensitive data.
On Friday the company warned U.S. customers about an email scam targeting former and current members.
