A commenter noted on my “Phoxes in your Phonebill” piece:
And if you don’t qualify for a credit card, of what value is your identity to thieves?
Good point. Not so good for those victimized in what is being hailed as the biggest credit card security breach ever:
A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.
If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.
Even better, because the breach was with the processor and not the merchant, individuals will just be guessing:
[Heartland president and CFO Robert] Baldwin said it would be unfair to mention any one of his company’s customers.
“No merchant of ours represents even [one-tenth of one percent] of our volume, and to put out any name associated with what is obviously an unfortunate incident is not fair,” he said. “Their customers might end up having their cards used fraudulently, but that fraud might turn out to have come from their store, or it might be from another Heartland store and no one will ever really know.”
Lovely.
But I still don’t recommend signing up for identity theft insurance through your phone bill.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, identity theft, credit cards, fraud[/tags]
Did this moron really say that? What a jerk! We can only hope that the merchants who use Heartless will inquire as to whether it was any of their customers who had their cards breached.
The company stressed that no merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), addresses or telephone numbers were jeopardized as a result of the breach.
So the false cards that can be created with the information would work at stores that only do a card-swipe– instead of a card-swipe and billing zip.