National Basketball Association

The Bucks were scammed into giving players' financial info to a hacker

Published May. 19, 2016 6:52 p.m. ET

foxsports

Welp. They fell for it. The oldest trick in the scamming book.

According to The Vertical's Shams Charania, the Milwaukee Bucks are scrambling to investigate the whos, hows and whats of a "serious security incident" from April that resulted in the release of Bucks players' most sensitive personal and financial information.

As Charania reports, on April 26 a "spoof hacker" posing as Milwaukee team president Peter Feigin sent an email requesting copies of the players' 2015 IRS W-2 forms. These documents were, in turn, sent back to the hacker—documents that included social security numbers, addresses, compensation figures and all other manner of information used in identity theft.

On Wednesday night, the team sent out an email telling players of the breach. Sufficed to say, the response from players' representives hasn't been very understanding.

The unnamed agent of one Bucks player called the breach "unacceptable," according to Charania, and called for the Bucks to explain what exactly is being done to make sure this accident doesn't open up players to larger consequences.

"The players need to know the exact measure being taken by the Bucks and the FBI to ensure each and every player's identity and financial information will not be compromised. There needs to be accountability for such a mistake, details on the steps taken to rectify it and a process put in place to make sure this never happens again."

Seeing as this is a personnel failure and not a software breach, the only real fix here is for Milwaukee to can whoever fell for the email and replace them with someone who won't be conned by a dolled up Nigerian Prince scam. Which is unfortunate, but then again, so is emailing other people's social security numbers out with no questions asked.

As for the Bucks, they released a statement saying they're continuing to investigate the matter and are training staff to, uh, be less gullible.

"We take this incident, and the privacy and security of our employees, very seriously," the team said in a statement. "We immediately launched an investigation, which is aggressive and ongoing. We quickly notified impacted individuals and are arranging for these individuals to have access to three years of credit monitoring and non-expiring identity restoration services...We believe this incident arose as a result of human error, and are providing additional privacy training to our staff and implementing additional preventative measures."

At this time I'd like to remind everyone of the most important rule of the Internet and/or life: Unless you've been subpoena'd, Don't. Say. Nothing. To. No. Body.

Dan is on Twitter. It's the code of the Internet streets.