February 25,2009
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News: Heartland ‘Clean-up' Operations Underway.
The drudgery of replacing compromised credit cards due to the Heartland breach is causing issuing banks to re-issue millions of cards to consumers as quickly as they can. World-leading Citigroup is, of course, one of the lenders impacted the most. They currently hold over 150 million credit card accounts worldwide. They're not alone, however. It's reported that hundreds of other banks across our nation are going through the same process. Not all of these affected banks are automatically issuing new credit cards, however. Many are simply monitoring the accounts of their clients in search of suspicious activities and will take action as necessary.
The number of affected credit cards have not yet been made public by most of the larger institutions. Some of the smaller institutions like credit unions have projected their affected client base to be, as high as, 20% of their clientele. Each of these credit card institutions are privately mailing warning letters to their clients with a higher probability of being affected. Typically, they are announced as an: 'Important Security Message'. They warn of the risk that the person's "account number may have been illegally obtained as a result of a merchant database compromise and could be at risk for unauthorized use".
All this pandemonium broke loose on Inauguration Day (1/20/09) when Heartland publicly announced the breach. The report indicated that the breach took place over the month of November of last year. The scope suggestion only included the month of November in which time, about 100 million credit card transactions may have been compromised. One might expect with a breach that big (the largest on record) and all this time, that a major scale of fraudulent use would have followed. But, so far, only three related arrests have be made on some ‘petty pawns' in Tallahassee. Probably the greatest hope lies in the interrogations that may lead us closer to the real demented-master minds in Eastern Europe who engineered the event.