Massive Fraud Uncovered With OfficeMax/CitiBank Cards

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[Get-Rich-Quick]
Mainstream Media Ignored Story: Citibank has put a transaction block on an unspecified number of Citi-branded MasterCard debit and credit cards used in three countries because of fraudulent automated teller machine (ATM) cash-withdrawal activity, the company said in a statement. The security problems were made public after a local blog uncovered the issue.

Rumor has it that OfficeMax may be one of the giant retailers who stored and compromised customers' PIN numbers and security. (Note: This is reason #733 why people should not use debit cards).

The scary part of this is a) Citibank has known about this for more than a month, and b) The Mainstream Media won't report the story and it makes you wonder how many other security breaches there have been that nobody knows about!

Citibank has frozen the use of an undisclosed number of debit cards in three countries after detecting "several hundred" fraudulent cash withdrawals in PIN-based transactions.

The data was stolen from the U.S., but the transactions occurred in Russia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

"Citibank and our customers were the victims of a third-party business information breach" last year, the company said in a statement.

"We immediately began enhanced monitoring of the affected accounts for fraud, and in mid-February we detected several hundred fraudulent cash withdrawals in three countries."

To protect customers' accounts, Citibank blocked an undisclosed number of PIN-based transactions in those locations, the company said.

Citibank, a unit of New York-based Citigroup Inc., said it is in the process of contacting affected customers and issuing new cards. The company declined to say how many cards it would reissue.

It declined to identify the retailer or the processing company from which the data was obtained.

A story in Wednesday's New York Times, citing unidentified sources, said it appeared that the Citibank debit card information was obtained through a security breach at OfficeMax Inc., the Itasca-based office supplies retailer.

OfficeMax said Wednesday that it had "no knowledge of a security breach."

It's not the first time, however, that OfficeMax has been dogged by concerns over the security of its data.

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that OfficeMax was at the center of a data breach affecting as many as 200,000 consumers. OfficeMax also said Wednesday that it had "no knowledge of a security breach" that was outlined in the Chronicle story

Citibank Probes ATM Withdrawals
Boing Boing Blog Article
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