Apparently, a data breach occurred between January 21, 2012 and February 25, 2012 and both major credit card companies and approximately 10,000,000 accounts have been compromised.
Please make sure to check your credit statement for charges (you can do this by phone), or if you’re like me – change your card number. If you opt to do this, you’ll get a new card in 7-10 days, and then you’ll have to activate it.
Please do your due diligence: Best to take a long hard look at that next billing statement.
If you don’t check, you might be liable for charges made to your account. Visa and Mastercard have stated you won’t, but save yourself the hassle. It’s a toll free call.
“According to the official alerts sent out by both Visa and MasterCard, so-called Track 1 and 2 data was included in the information stolen. That means the hackers have all the data they need to clone cards from scratch. The banks and credit unions believed to be affected are investigating the breach more thoroughly, and contacting businesses and individuals with potentially compromised accounts. Global Payments has admitted that it did not notice the breach until early March, and some cards have already been used in the wild.”
- http://www.geek.com/articles/news/visa-and-mastercard-announce-massive-data-breach-10-million-credit-cards-compromised-20120330/
Sorry to bring you this news…. and hope no one here has been hurt.
Update: 4/2/12:
Global payments hinted that:
"In a statement, the firm said "less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported" by hackers who had access to its payment processing system. "Cardholder names, addresses and social security numbers were not obtained by the criminals."
- Global Payment Systems
While this is less than the original estimate, please remain vigilant and please check your credit statements closely...even small charges.