| 10 September 2009

If you had an account with Ameritrade prior to September 14, 2007 chances are your email address was stolen in a data breach. A hearing was held today in a U.S. district court in San Francisco to determine a fair settlement.

Though terms are not yet agreed it looks like TD Ameritrade (AMTD) will settle for about $1.9 million and will give everyone affected a one-year subscription to Trend Micro anti-spam software, apparently to stave off the wave of spam e-mailed to account holders after the breach.

Ameritrade hired a firm that specializes in identity theft analysis, ID Analytics, Inc., to scour the database four times and they found no evidence of organized identity theft resulting in the breach.

Even though social security numbers and account numbers were in the breached database, those numbers also appear to be safe. User names PINs and passwords were kept in a separate database.