Personal Finance and Money Management

Banks and credit card issuers are warning customers that millions of e-mail addresses were possibly stolen from an advertising company last week. As a result, customers could receive fraudulent e-mails that attempt to coax their account login information from them.

Major Banks Affected by the Theft

A number of major banks and financial institutions say customers may begin seeing e-mails that try to trick them into providing login information for their bank accounts and credit cards due to a security breach at a Dallas-based e-mail management company called Epsilon.

Some banks that could have been affected by the breach include Barclays Bank, Capital One Financial Corp. U.S. Bancorp and Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Retailers were also affected by the breach, including TiVo Inc., Best Buy Co., Kroger Co., Walgreen Co. and Walt Disney’s travel subsidiary, Disney Destinations.

In addition to banks and retailers, The College Board, a not-for-profit organization that runs the SATs, said the hacker may have obtained student e-mail addresses as well.

What Customers Could Expect

If you are among the millions of customers who could be affected by the breach, many of the companies are warning that you could experience the following in the coming days and months:

• Spam e-mails: Customers could soon start seeing e-mails advertising for products or websites they have never visited or shown interest in.
• Phishing scams: The warnings also said that customers could see e-mails that look as though they’re coming from their own banks. The e-mails may suggest there’s a problem with the account and ask them to login. If this happens to you, you’re encouraged to delete the e-mail, open a new browser and visit your website’s URL directly to see if there’s a real issue.

Epsilon noted on Friday that while the system breaching did expose e-mail addresses and customer names, no other personal information was compromised. So for now, customers are encouraged to look carefully at e-mails that come in to avoid having money stolen from their accounts or becoming the victim of identity theft.

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Tags: Card Issuers, Credit Card, Credit Card Issuers, Customers