Sorry I missed it. Parent-Teacher conference took a little longer than expected.

Looks like HSBC is "taking it seriously" by blaming others before looking into internal matters first, from what I can tell!

I spoke with a representative from HSBC-Direct's Online Savings Accounts division. She said that since the HSBC-Direct accounts have an ATM card without Mastercard/Visa privileges, they are not affected by this breach.

An aspiring rapper co-worker of mine once rhymed: "I'll smoke you like a Marlboro, make you Chuck like Scarborough." I think my rapper friend is probably in jail nowadays, but Chuck is still reading the news.

Regarding HSBC's claim that a credit card payment processor lost the customer data: I don't think that a credit card processor would have ATM pins, correct?

@littlejohnny: sounds more like "I'm not bad, everyone else is should be in trouble, look at them while I hide in my room under the bed"

We're here in Philly, and my husband was notified this week that his PNC account suffered an attempted hacking - someone got his login and made five quick attempts to hack his password before PNC shut them down. I doubt it's related, but it was creepy to hear about then and then see all this going on to boot.

Joseph writes:

"I also had about $3000 fraudulently withdrawn from my HSBC checking account. Six withdrawals were made in New Orleans. On President's Day, I called them after I couldn't make an ATM withdrawal and the customer service was a joke. They could not tell me anything. The next day, again, corporate customer service was pretty bad, but they eventually connected me to my local New City, New York branch and their customer service was great. They advised me of the fraudulent activity and put me in touch with corporate security. Corporate security was quick and to the point. It seemed like they definitely knew what was going on. When I suggested that maybe a card got stolen from the mail, they said "No, it's a counterfeit ATM card." They, of course, did not mention anything about any security breach leading to my PIN number being discovered. Anyway, this is a big pain, but they assured me I will have all money returned within ten business days. We'll see about that. The most annoying part about the entire thing is that HSBC did not put a hold on my account until after it was at a negative $500 balance. I was using the card in Manhattan and continuous $500 withdrawals were being made in Louisiana. They need to improve their fraud monitoring system if they couldn't catch that sooner."

I had Citi contact me a few weeks back. They said a payment processor/atm network had a security breach. They asked me to immediately change my PIN and then within 2 weeks I had a new card. Looks like they took it seriously and HSBC dropped the ball.

All of this pretty much tells me that it seems like we need to churn our own cards every six months or so to avoid these things. And to have multiple checking accounts where only one is used as a debit card, one is the funding account, one is an auto pay, and one is an idle account. That way if the debit account blows up then you can switch over to the idle or autopay account quickly and not have to wait for the nimrods to get your money back in 10 days.

How exciting for you, consumerist

At the same time, would they admit that? And who picked up the phone? Is it someone who would know, or some random CSR?

@Ben Popken: Yeah if you decide to attempt to hold a conversation with someone who has no idea abut fruad because they are overseas you will rum into that problem next time go to the fraud unit or a branch and insist that a hold be placed. That is the only thing that will work