A letter from President Stephen Jordan has been sent to the 93,000 alumni and students whose names were on the college laptop that was stolen Feb. 26.

The letter was mailed last week. As a result, there has been a spike in the number of calls to the toll-free help center set up by Metro State at 1-866-737-6622. According to Steve Foster, CEO of Business Controls, Inc., the firm running the call center, approximately 2,000 calls have come into the center since the theft was announced March 2. He said that the daily number of calls is around 20.

The number of hits to www.mscd.edu/securityalert/ also spiked following the mailing. So far, there have been 13,100 unique visitors to the site, with 24,340 page loads.

The College was able to merge its database with that of the Colorado Department of Revenue in order to have the most up-to-date addresses. Also, the Institutional Advancement area coincidentally had purchased an address update service in December to update the entire alumni database on its Raisers Edge software. It is hoped that between these two resources, the College was able to mail the letters to the most current addresses possible.

To download a PDF version of the letter go to http://www.mscd.edu/securityalert/documents/letter_031606.pdf

No reports of ID theft
Meanwhile, according to Foster, there have been no factual, verifiable incidents of identity theft “where we could prove that they were tied to stolen database.”

Nor have there been any new developments in the investigation of the laptop’s theft.