Back in October, this site reported that “tens of thousands” of Swedish banking customers and “tens of thousands” of Finnish banking customers had been affected by a breach in Spain that might involve a card payment processor. Today, the BBC reports that:
Anyone who used a Visa or Mastercard credit card when in Spain may have had their card data compromised.
In Germany, as many as 100,000 cards are reportedly being recalled.
In a statement, Visa Europe confirmed that “it is aware of a possible card data security issue in Spain. No details are yet confirmed, but we do not believe that the issue is specific to Visa.”
Visa and Mastercard reportedly starting alerting banks about four weeks ago. The Local (Germany) reports:
According to Wednesday’s edition of the Financial Times Deutschland, the Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank have decided to take more than 60,000 Visa and Mastercards out of circulation.
That brings the total number of credit cards recalled in Germany in recent weeks to more than 100,000. In October, retailer KarstadtQuelle replaced more than 15,000 customer credit cards while the German subsidiary of Barclay’s also recalled thousands. Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank also froze hundreds of credit cards as a precautionary matter.
At the weekend, German airliner Lufthansa announced it was replacing thousands of its “Miles & More” cards issued by the Deutsche Kreditbank after it was found many of the cards were used in Spain. However, so far there have been no cases of fraud discovered with the cards that can be used to collect frequent flyer miles with the airline.