ATLANTA – Trading in Global Payments Inc. was halted this afternoon when the company’s shares plunged 13% after credit cards processor was identified as the likely source of the massive cards breach affecting Visa and MasterCard.
Global’s shares fell 9.1% to $47.50 when trading was halted on the New York Stock Exchange, after earlier falling almost 13%, as news of the latest large-scale cards breach spread.
Visa and MasterCard have flagged thousands of cards that may be compromised, prompting credit unions, banks and third part processors to scramble to determine whether any of the cards have been hit by fraud.
Officials at Global Payments did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.
Both Visa and MasterCard said their own internal systems have not been breached and they attributed the latest compromise to a third party processor.
Alerts were sent out to US credit unions and banks late last week and the affected card issuers are analyzing data transactions in a bid to track a common point of purchase. Several credit unions have been blocking cards over the past few days in response.
On Wednesday, PSCU said it alerted 482 credit unions that appear to have had cards impacted by the breach, and that a total of 56,455 member VISA and MasterCard accounts were compromised. PSCU said fraudulent activity had been detected on a relatively small number of those cards — 876 accounts — and that the activity was geographically dispersed.
