A Maltese e-commerce firm has severed ties with two foreign clients amid claims they were involved in a leak of millions of credit card numbers, Times of Malta has learnt. Michael Burtscher, vice president of risk and fraud management at Credorax Malta Ltd, confirmed that the company had halted all business with a number of enterprises owned by two Cypriot businessmen.
The move came amid rumours that the companies could have made use of information stolen during a cyber attack on a number of US retailers last month.
As many as 70 million credit card numbers, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers were taken in the security breach. Holders of cards belonging to Maltese banks were not affected.
The leak, however, inadvertently led to a number of credit card scams, including one affecting Maltese consumers in possession of foreign cards.
Customers complained of scams
Consumers complained of a number of scams in recent weeks, most of which centred around mystery charges of nearly €10.
Mr Burtscher would not confirm whether the two businessmen had been directly involved in the breach but admitted that a number of companies owned by the pair had not passed several anti-fraud probes.
“There are limits to what I can tell you but any merchant acquirer has fraud monitoring in place and different tolerance levels of what they would consider an acceptable level of fraud. When we investigated them we were not satisfied with the responses we were getting,” he said.
Asked if he had any information linking the two to the cybercrime, Mr Burtscher said he had no evidence that the companies had made use of stolen data but had received a number of complaints from consumers in relation to “mystery charges”.
Interestingly, many of the services offered by the companies owned by the two businessmen are priced the same as the unexplained charges on victims’ bank statements.
Mr Burtscher said that when confronted with their suspicious behaviour, the two businessmen denied any involvement and even claimed to have been victims of the scam themselves.