TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post

Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post

Steve Sobol (sjsobol@JustThe.net)
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:12:14 -0700

Marcus Didius Falco wrote:

> After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused
> to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those
> compromised.

Amex sucks. Tear the card up and get another to replace it.

> When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second most
> active card in my wallet, and so on down the list.

Why not do all of them at once? If the data is at risk, you're best off
doing it sooner rather than later.

> Such credit-card-issuing banks said MasterCard and Visa have shared
> with them lists of account numbers that may have been
> compromised. Though such accounts may earn heightened scrutiny from
> the banks that issued them, customers may never know whether their
> account numbers were among those stolen by hackers.

Which, of course, screws the customers to a certain extent, but screws
the merchants even more because the merchants bear the losses. Amex is
the worst to deal with if you're a merchant. They are expensive and
have very merchant-unfriendly policies. (I think some of their
cardholder policies aren't very friendly, either.)

> "Those accounts have been flagged, and we're watching them even more
> closely than we otherwise would," said Jim Donahue, spokesman at
> MBNA. "If we start to see an unusual rate of fraud [among the set of
> compromised accounts], we would consider notifying those customers
> impacted -- but we haven't seen that yet."

Yeah. What a load of self-serving crap. It's not just about the credit
cards. It's about SSNs and other personal information. To withhold
information about such breaches is criminal.

> "That sounds really bad to us," said Chanelle Hardy, legislative
> counsel at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer
> Reports magazine. "Any time that any unauthorized person gets access
> to sensitive or personal information, [the cardholder] should be
> notified," she said. "For a consumer, it's the first line of
> defense. It's almost their only line of defense."

Exactly.

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