Have they tried EBay?

Could be a plot to persuade gullable hackers to invest $20,000

for tape drives, controllers neccesary to read the tapes.

This happened to me, and our employer (who didn't lose the data, but their payroll contractor did, who forgot to read the security bit of the contract allegedly) and we got free accounts on a credit watch service. With the amount of data going missing me thinks there's money in credit checking!

I was at an IBM presentation just this morning where IBM was naming names of companies that failed to encrypt tape data and were burned when they were lost/stolen.

Makes my day...

Who was the other party to the car accident, and are they under investigation?