What To Do About The Macys Breach?
By: Jim Stickley and Tina Davis
December 6, 2019
Attention Macy’s shoppers! If you shopped online at the Macy’s website between October 7 and October 15, 2019, your payment card number just may have been grabbed by an unauthorized party. Yes, it’s Magecart again; that notorious group of cybercriminals that inject payment card skimmers into websites that do ecommerce.
This same type of thing happened to Ticketmaster, Newegg, and numerous other well-known sites. In this particular case, first and last names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and the coveted information from the payment cards were accessed.
Macy’s sent a notice to customers it believed were affected, but anyone using a payment card during the time the skimmer was in place should be sure to check all charges on the cards that may have been used. If anything is not familiar, contact the card issuer and get it resolved. The sooner this happens, the less hassle and less expensive for all parties involved.
Skimmers work by gathering up the details from the website visitor. They are inserted onto the ecommerce sites and often sit on the checkout pages where the valuable information is entered.
Those who were notified by Macy’s are being offered credit monitoring services from Experian IdentityWorks. If you are one of these consumers, take advantage of these services when they are offered to you. While they will not stop someone from using information to commit fraud, they will alert you when someone tries to open accounts, get credit, or even access your credit report. In fact, if you don’t need access to your report or don’t need to provide it to others (to get a car loan or rent an apartment, for instance), consider putting a freeze on your credit reports. Congress passed laws requiring the credit bureaus to allow freezing and unfreezing of credit reports at no charge. It’s fairly simple to do and you can even unfreeze it for a temporary time period to give someone access, if needed. So, check into this for added protection against fraud.
As for the payment card that may have been affected in this case, be sure to watch for those unauthorized charges and check your accounts frequently, especially during busy shopping periods.