Zurich Life Insurance Co. said Friday its Japanese branch has lost some 1,200 pieces of customer data stored in dossiers and on a CD-ROM disc.
The data include claims and other benefit applications that policyholders submitted from 1997 to this year, Zurich Life said in a statement.
The insurer, a unit of Zurich Financial Services Group of Switzerland, has started alerting those concerned via mail and other means. In addition, it began responding to customers' inquiries on the matter via a new toll-free phone number.
Zurich Life said it first became aware of the loss in July, when staff found that the application dossiers related to 30 pieces of personal data had been lost.
The discovery led the insurer to start an in-house probe, which discovered that another 1,178 pieces of data had been lost, including the CD-ROM. Some of the lost application dossiers include sensitive data.