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by LAUREN LAWSON
News Reporter
As the economy takes a downturn, the threat to personal security seems to have increased with multiple recent breaches of financial information through hackers and fraud schemes world-wide.
According to a press release by the Federal Bureau of Investigations in December, “approximately 100 stolen and cloned payroll debit cards and open-loop (reload able) gift cards were used to make numerous unauthorized withdrawals from Atlanta-area automatic teller machines.”
It was later
revealed by various news sources such as Fox5 that this scheme was not
isolated to Atlanta but was part of a world-wide ATM scam involving the
theft of $9 million and exposed sensitive information from people
internationally.
This scheme involved hacking into the company, Royal Bank of Scotland Worldpay, where personal information was stolen.
This is not the only scheme of this kind to hit the United States.
According
to a press release by State Employees’ Credit Union, they were notified
by Visa of a security breach at a U.S. payment processor company,
Heartland Payment Services.
“HPS
does not process any card transactions for SECU, SECU receives
transactions from Visa, which have been processed through Heartland,”
according to SECU.
One of
SECU’s customers and senior sociology major Kellie L. Warren said SECU
mailed a letter to her permanent address informing her of a security
breach on her card and issued her a new card within a week.
“This is
not the first time it has happened,” Warren said. “Last time they cut
off my debit card immediately, this time they said I could still use my
card until the new one came but I had to monitor anything suspicious.”
Senior
Vice President of SECU’s Card and Record Services department Leanne
Phelps said this security breach probably affected every financial
institution in the country.
Other institutions who also have issued new debit cards to customers due to security breaches include Bank of America.
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