Ledger and Shopify have found themselves in hot water recently. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the two companies by a group of Ledger users for the part they played in the huge data breach that had occurred back in 2020. The suit was filed on Friday in Delaware and has alleged that the global e-commerce platform, had failed to keep its customers’ identities safe. Along with Shopify, TaskUs, the third-party data consultant that the platform uses, are the focus of the complainants. They are holding them responsible for the breach of their personally identifiable information (PII). As per the plaintiffs, the Shopify platform had make marketing promises of offering full security to Ledger users.
They have further alleged that both TaskUs and Shopify had been aware of the data breach for about a week before they decided to notify their clients. Now, the complainants want the hardware wallet maker and Shopify to provide them the exact nature of the information that was compromised and are also seeking a monetary reward that will cover the punitive as well as actual damages that the Ledger wallet users may have incurred. Based in France, Ledger is also mentioned as a defendant in the class-action lawsuit because of the claims it made regarding customer security.
According to the complaint, Ledger had conducted a worldwide advertising campaign and made promises repeatedly about offering their customers unmatched security. But, the company, along with its data manufacturing vendors including TaskUs and Shopify, had failed to protect the identity of their customers and this had resulted in attacks on the crypto assets owned by thousands of their clients. Hence, the members of the class-action lawsuit had not received the security they had been promised when they bought their Ledger wallets. Also known as cold wallets, hardware wallets are physical devices.
Therefore, they are capable of offering users higher security for their seed phrases and private keys. They are advertised as offering better security than hot wallets. According to the complaint, Shopify is used by Ledger for running the online store on their website. This means that the PII data of clients on the database of Ledger can easily be accessed by Shopify. Since the e-commerce platform relies on TaskUs for offering customer support services, it means the latter also has access to all the data on Ledger’s database. In the huge breach that occurred in 2020, about 272,000 Ledger users had their personal information compromised, along with a million people who had subscribed to Ledger’s email newsletter.
Ledger users also had to face a huge intimidation and phishing campaign and a number of them lost their crypto assets as a result. This class-action lawsuit is not the first one to be filed against the two companies over this data breach. A similar lawsuit had also been filed in California by a different group of plaintiffs in April 2021. Similar allegations were made as in the Delaware filing about the negligence of both Shopify and Ledger in protecting their customers’ data.
