Lawmakers Air Concerns In CardSystemsCase

WASHINGTON - (07/20/05) -- Top executives of Visa, MasterCard,American Express and Discover Financial Services will square offThursday with the head of CardSystems Solutions before a keycongressional committee investigating the massive theft of creditcard data from CardSystems. The hearing before the House FinancialServices Consumer Credit Subcommittee comes just three days afterVisa announced it will stop allowing CardSystems to handletransactions over its system because the third-party processor hasyet to implement proper security for the millions of cardtransactions it processes for the card companies. Thursday'shearing is the third in a series in an effort by lawmakers toaddress the growing incidents of online theft of credit card data,used by thieves all over the world to access accounts at banks andcredit unions. "Consumers everywhere deserve to know for certainthat their credit card accounts are safe and secure as they areprocessed," said Rep. Sue Kelly, R-N.Y., chairman of thesubcommittee. "This hearing will help us learn more about thetroubling breach by CardSystems as we develop ways to make surethis is an anomaly that will never be repeated." Dozens of creditunions around the country have moved to replace cards they believehave been compromised in the theft of data on some 40 millionaccounts from CardSystems.