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Financial institutions cancelled an unspecified number of credit cards in Ireland last week after fraud-monitoring systems detected suspicious payments to a United States-based e-commerce food merchant, the Irish Payment Services Organization tells CardLine Global. Small payments of less than 2 euros each alerted the monitoring systems to possible "test sales" by fraudsters who may have been making the transactions to confirm the stolen card information was still valid, the organization's spokesperson says. The organization is investigating the information breach and does not know how the thieves obtained the stolen data, the spokesperson says. The organization also does not know how many of Ireland's nine credit card issuers were affected. However, reports that hundreds of cardholders were robbed of data were "a bit exaggerated," the spokesperson says. "Overall, there was very little impact, but it proves that these monitoring systems do work well and prevented a larger fraud problem," she says. The monitoring systems alerted banks, which then contacted affected customers and reissued cards, the spokesperson says.
