No Action Needed on SLX "Personal Information" Letter

Many of my SLX clients have contacted me about a letter that they received from SLX in late January or early February regarding the inadvertant disclosure of certain personal information and the subsequent destruction of said information. My opinion is that no action is needed on said letter. I have not had any reports of any identity theft or attempted identity theft as a result of SLX's actions. Here is what the letter says:

We recently became aware of an incident involving certain personal information related to some Student Loan Xpress, Inc. student loan data. The service provider for your loan(s), American Education Services (“AES”), inadvertently transmitted a report which contained your personal information to another student loan lender with which AES contracts. That lender has indicated that it destroyed all of the information it mistakenly received. We have no evidence that any of the information has been used in an unauthorized manner as a result of this incident. The information that AES inadvertently sent to the unauthorized recipient may have included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and information specific to you student loan account. We are working with AES to take steps to help ensure that this type of incident does not happen in the future.

We regret that this incident may affect you. We take our obligation to safeguard personal information very seriously and, therefore, we are alerting you so you can take steps to protect yourself from possible identity theft. We encourage you to remain vigilant and regularly review and monitor your account statements and credit reports. The attached Reference Guide provides details on these and other steps you may wish to consider.

You are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three national credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll free
(877) 322-8228.

To further assist you, we recommend that you register for credit monitoring, which we have arranged to provide at no charge to you. The attached Reference Guide provides information on how you can register for the credit monitoring and recommendations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on how to further protect yourself against identity fraud. You may also want to place a fraud alert or security freeze on your credit file.

We hope this information is useful to you. If you have questions regarding this incident, please call AES’s dedicated Customer Service staff at 1-800-2149320 between the hours of 8:00 am and 5:00 pm EST.

Again, we regret any inconvenience this may cause you.

David Harmon
Executive Vice President
Student Loan Xpress, Inc.