LendingTree may have leaked customer's personal data to third party mortgage lenders.

Investigation and pending class action lawsuit against LendingTree, LLC for a data breach affecting its customers.

On April 21, 2008, LendingTree notified its customers that their personal and financial information was leaked in a security breach. LendingTree announced the following on its website: 'We want you to know that some loan request forms our customers sent to LendingTree may have been seen by lenders without our consent. These lenders then used the forms to market their own mortgage loans to our customers. . . .Recently, LendingTree learned that several former employees may have helped a handful of mortgage lenders gain access to LendingTree's customer information by sharing confidential passwords with the lenders. . . .Based on our investigation, we understand that these mortgage lenders used the passwords to access LendingTree's customer loan request forms, normally available only to LendingTree-approved lenders, to market loans to those customers." The loan request forms contained data such as name, address, email address, telephone number, Social Security number, income and employment information.
We believe these lenders accessed LendingTree's loan request forms between October 2006 and early 2008."

In addition to receiving unwanted solicitations from lenders, customers are at risk of fraud and identity theft. LendingTree advised its customers to "file a fraud alert" with credit bureaus, obtain a credit report, and review the credit report for "accounts you didn't open." LendingTree has not disclosed how many customers were affected by this incident.