TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Officials with Envision CU said they have been told the new card breach forcing them to reissue Visa credit and debit cards was the result of an invasion of popular restaurant and gaming company Dave & Buster’s.
“Yes, it is,” said Al Hammock, a spokesman for the $200-million credit union, confirming the report.
The breach, announced last month by the U.S. Secret Service, has caused dozens of credit unions and banks to reissue cards. Envision CU has reissued a total of 612 Visa cards, including that of its president Roy Cromer, according to Hammock.
The credit union’s CEO was one of two credit union employees whose accounts were unsuccessfully hacked. Cromer was in Orlando, when Falcon Fraud Manager alerted the credit union of unusual activity on his account. When the credit union called Cromer’s home, his wife told them he was not in Oklahoma making $4,000 in purchases on his card, according to Hammock.
Envision was originally notified of 1,700 accounts potentially compromised but whittled it down to 612 after eliminating old and inactive accounts, said Hammock. “We did what we thought was the responsible thing to do and wrote all of the 612 members and told them what was going on,” Hammock told Credit Union Journal.
Three foreign-based individuals were charged in a U.S. court last month with tapping into Dave & Buster’s from overseas by installing so-called packet sniffers over the Internet on the company’s computers. The packet sniffers were able to capture Track 2 cards data, including account numbers and PINs as the transactions were being sent to the restaurant chain’s cards processor.
Officials with Dave & Buster’s did not return phone calls seeking comment.
One of the three defendants charged last month with the Dave & Buster’s breach was Maksym Yastremskiy, a well-known international trafficker in credit card information who is also suspected of selling account data from the massive TJX breach. The 24-year-old Ukrainian was arrested a year ago in the Turkish resort city of Kemer.
Yastremskiy and his accomplices allegedly stole the Dave & Buster’s account information while overseas, then sold it to others who used it to make fraudulent purchases, causing losses to financial institutions.
Envision’s Hammock said so far they have not detected any fraud losses.(c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
