Imagine that you open up your email and find a message from your credit card company with the attention-getting subject line, “Important: What you can do now about the recent data breach.” Would you think that Discover had had a customer data breach? You wouldn’t be alone.

Plenty of Discover customers were confused by the above message, including Christopher Zara, a writer for Fast Company, who wrote an article to clear things up for other users with similar questions.

“You can’t just say ‘breach’ and expect everyone to know which one,” notes Zara.

The email turned out to be about protecting oneself after data breaches in general, and the message was intended to be about the catastrophic breach of personal data that credit bureau Equifax has gathered about people who have credit accounts.

An extra-cynical interpretation might be that hey, more customers probably opened the email if they believed it was about a previously unannounced breach of their personal data.

Other than the Tweet, Discover hasn’t responded to questions about this email. Zara contacted the company and didn’t hear back, and Consumerist contacted Discover as well. If we hear anything back, we will update this post.

UPDATE: Discover sent us a statement, reiterating that there was no data breach:

“Customer confusion through our channels has been very minimal. Obviously we will work with customers expressing issues on social, as the Fast Company story highlighted.”

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.