It’s every credit card holders nightmare. You’re looking at your monthly bill and see a purchase for a computer and a trip to Mexico that you really don’t remember buying. That can’t be right can it? Oh, oh, looks like your details could have been stolen.
This is the scenario that has affected some Canadians who were shopping in the US to take advantage of the good ‘ol days when Canadians were taking advantage of the strong dollar. There was a massive security breach at a US payment systems processor called Heartland Payment Systems that hackers broke into and stole the personal details of thousand of transactions, and 175,000 businesses in the US are affected. They process 100M transactions a month and don’t know how badly they were affected which is scary for everyone involved.
One Manitoban who was affected said Mastercard was quite good and when she explained the situation they sent her a new card in the mail. Mastercard said that their company policy is to contact the customer, add a stop on the account and the send out another credit card. There’s not much you can do in a situation like this but at least the credit card companies seem to handle these situations fairly well. Don’t forget there are regulations to protect you and take a look at our article outlining your credit card holder rights to make sure you are getting the right information and are being treated fairly by your credit card issuer.
Update
As an update to this post, Canadian Tire has cancelled and is re-issuing 16,00 Options Mastercards because of the Heartland security breach as these cards could be at risk as they were used in the US.
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