PORTLAND, Maine – Credit unions throughout the Northeast and in Florida were struggling yesterday to notify members of the possible compromise of their account information and to shut down targeted cards after supermarket giant Hannaford Bros. disclosed a massive data breach of its accounts.
“It’s been a very expensive few days, my entire staff has been doing nothing but fielding customer calls,” said Chris Daudelin, president of Town & Country FCU, who plans to reissue about 12,000 Visa debit cards flagged as compromised by the breach.
Jon Paradise, spokesman for the Maine CU League, said he expects credit unions to be forced to replace more than 100,000 cards due to the breach by the state’s largest supermarket chain. “There will be a huge impact. In a lot of communities they’re the only grocery store,” he said.
Credit unions elsewhere were counting the toll of the latest cards breach. “Hannaford Brothers has stores at all of our locations,” said John Benoit, a $170 million credit union in Burlington, Vt., which is reissuing 3,000 MasterCard debit and 400 Visa credit cards.
“We know it’s going to be costly,” Benoit told The Credit Union Journal yesterday, referring to the process of notifying members and reissuing cards.
Meantime, Visa and MasterCard have blocked transactions going to Brazil, where activity on some of the cards has been identified. Town & Country’s Daudelin said it noticed some attempted transactions on his credit union’s cards coming from Brazil, but were able to block them. So far, Town & Country has not detected any fraud losses, but it is urging members to review their transaction records over the last three months to see if some of the fraud has occurred undetected.
Hannaford Bros, which operates 165 grocery stores in the Northeast under the corporate name and 105 Sweetbay grocery stores in Florida, said as many as 4.3 million accounts may have been accessed. So far, about 1,800 incidents of fraud have been reported.
Belgium-based Delhaize Group, whose Delhaize America Inc. unit also includes Food Lion and other grocery chains, owns Hannaford.
