Three Men Arrested In Heartland Data Breach For Using Fake Visa Gift Cards

The U.S. Secret Service has arrested three men in Florida on “hundreds of counts of credit card fraud” for using fake gift cards imprinted with account info stolen from Heartland Payment Systems last year. The Secret Service still thinks an Eastern European group is behind the Heartland breach, and that the Florida guys are smaller-time crooks who most likely purchased a subset of the stolen data.

One thing that’s new about the case is the use of Visa gift cards—they’re easy to shoplift, and then the stolen account info can be encoded onto the magnetic strip on the back. It’s also harder to catch fraudulent use via gift card, and there are fewer ID restrictions. The men were caught because they used the stolen data for too long and it began to go bad—near the end, Walmart’s system was catching and flagging accounts that had already been deactivated, which was what alerted them to the fraud.

“First Heartland Arrests, With New Twist To Bogus Gift Card Scheme” [StorefrontBacktalk]
(Photo: ToOb)

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