SAN DIEGO -- A Sprouts Farmers Market employee tells 10News workers are worried and upset after a corporate blunder put their personal information directly in the hands of scammers.
“You don’t expect that from the place you work at, but that’s what happened,” said a San Diego Sprouts employee, who asked to remain anonymous.
Last week, a payroll department employee at the company's headquarters in Arizona responded to an email thought to be from a company senior executive. In the email, the person asked for the 2015 W-2 statements of all Sprouts workers.
The employee complied with the request, but the company quickly realized that the email was not legitimate and contacted federal authorities.
The FBI and IRS are now investigating the scam. A company spokesperson did not say how many employees were affected by the phishing scam.
“Mostly, employees are kind of upset,” said the employee. “Some of them are willing to sue.”
According to Bloomberg, Sprouts employs 20,000 people.
“As soon as they take your Social Security, you are done,” he said.
Sprouts said they are offering employees one year of free credit monitoring.
“I think that’s not enough,” the employee told 10News.
He thinks it should be at least five years.
“That should be the minimum I think,” he said.
10News reached out to Sprouts to get a response but had not heard back as of Tuesday night.
