Not the kind of record we want broken...

A new high water mark for Credit Card theft has been discovered. Potentially 100 MILLION credit cards may have been compromised. The breach happened at one of the largest credit card processors. Here is a link to the story:

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=109771&email

The take away advice from this is to check your credit card statements for small unauthorized transactions. Sometimes fraudsters will "test" a card by attempting to authorize a charge as small as a few cents to see if the is card active. This will appear as some sort of service charge. Another "test" is a small donation to a charity. If you think your card has been compromised, just call your credit card company and report the card stolen. They will send you new ones for free.

I've had two credit card numbers stolen in the past 3 months. One, I caught by looking at my statement. The other, was reported to my CC company even though it had never been used fraudulently. The first was most likely due to a local theater that had a trojan on their server that was stealing numbers. The second may have been related to this processor, depending on when the breach was actually identified.

They don't need to print the cards.
If they have the data they can do it all through the internet billing systems.

I had one of mine stolen by a gas station years ago. They never had the card as I used the pay at the pump but they were able to get the info form their system and make a copy.
If your not using online banking then you need to sign up. I've had cards lost or stolen a couple times and never knew it until the monthly statement came in the mail. Since then I've signed up for internet based so I can check every day or so. It only takes a minute a day to just sign in and give a quick look.

Eugene,

I had the same thing happen from a gas station in NC while traveling through. The stupid part was the person used the credit card numbers to make long distance calls from their house to a relative out of state. When I did the tracking down they provided the numbers which lead me straight to there house with a number reversal. Nobody said criminals were smart, if they were I would catch a lot less of them atleast from stupid mistakes like this.

Mark