Leumi Card, the credit card company of Bank Leumi (TASE: LUMI), announced today that the particulars of 450 international credit cards belonging to Israeli customers had been exposed in the course of a huge credit card fraud in the US.
Leumi Card added that the company had received particulars of 450 cards suspected of being in the fraud. A quarter of these were already blocked previously, following internal warnings from the company’s risk management systems.
Leumi Card has contacted the other customers directly concerning the blocking of their cards, which was described as preventative blocking. Leumi Card replaced these cards with others. There is now no concern about irregular use of these cards. In any case, the customers are insured, and will suffer no damage.
Israel Credit Cards-Cal (ICC-Cal) said that as of now, no customers had been found who had suffered damage, or who had suffered exposure of their credit card particulars. The company added that it recommended that customers monitor the page listing debiting transactions. ICC-Cal said that this was always essential, even in the absence of any known fraud.
Isracard, the credit card company of Bank Hapoalim (LSE: BKHD; TASE: POLI), declined to commend on the question of whether particulars of its Israeli customers had also been exposed. The company stresses that its customers were insured in any case in which a card had been used for a transaction by someone else, and therefore had no cause for concern. “We are following, and will continue to follow, development in the affair in the US,” Isracard added.
In the course of the large-scale theft of information in the EU, particulars of 40 million credit cards were exposed.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on June 19, 2005