By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

A consumer rights group will begin gathering plaintiffs today for a class-action suit against Internet company, Daum, to claim damages over the leaking of private information.

A security blunder had Daum users directed to wrong e-mail accounts for nearly an hour on July 22, an error the company said occurred while it was running programs to upgrade its mailing system.

Consumers Korea (www.cacpk.org) will allow Daum users to join the suit for a fee of 5,000 won and is planning to seek compensation of about 500,000 won per person.

About 530,000 Daum subscribers had their accounts exposed to a third person and more than 400 users so far have claimed that e-mails were deleted and other data altered, the civic group said.

``Some Daum users have been telling us that they accidentally erased e-mails of other subscribers thinking they had logged-in to their own accounts, while others complained that their credit-card bills, test applications and other important documents were erased,'' said a spokesperson of the civic group.

``Everyone feels uneasy about the possibility that their mailboxes might have been probed by a third person,'' she said.

Daum is the country's largest provider of e-mail services with more than 20 million subscribers.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr