"I thought I'd write you to let you and your readers know of a data theft that occured at monoprice.com recently. I just this morning received a letter from them stating that there was likely identity theft/fraud commited against legitimate credit card accounts due to stolen CC/personal information. The letter stated that purchases from the beginning of February to the third week in March were vulnerable to the data theft (though personally I'd suspect any purchase made this year).
I recently had to close my personal Discover Card account and open a new one due to fraudulent transactions on 3/16/2010. $3.00 from the iTunes store (known fraud - my iTunes account is linked to my bank's credit card, not the Discover AND I have a gift card balance on my account AND my last purchase was 12/31/2009), $148.75 from Old Navy and a whopping $539.10 at macmall.com (I haven't had to buy anything for my Mac Pro in two years other than the SSD I bought locally.)
While I wasn't responsible for these fraudulent purchases because I actually caught them less than 24 hours (four hours in fact!) after they occured, others might not be so lucky. (I'm not an expert on this but IIRC you have 30 days to dispute charges and generally are not liable for over $50 with CC's.) I check my online balance vs. available credit limit daily. If it doesn't match up, I contact Discover and go over all transactions one by one and verify them. I never had to do that until last month when this fraudulent activity occured.
So this is meant to be a heads up for readers who use monoprice, which is still a good place to shop as far as I'm concerned (they gave me 12 months of ID theft protection by a company I'd not heard of, but it's free and I can cancel anytime I want). If your readers have purchased anything from monoprice.com this year, they MUST check their credit card transactions VERY carefully for fraud. And if anybody plans to use them again, I'd use PayPal as the payment method, if available and DO NOT STORE YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO.
The notice on their website is here: http://www.monoprice.com/home/view_notice.asp
I wish your readers the best of luck regarding this situation.
- Eric"
I wonder if they also stored the CC 3 digit security code (something that should never be done IMHO). IIRC Discover had a way to create a 'single use' number via their website. (They used to, not sure if they still do. Required login at discover site to generate the 1 time use number.)
