On March 31st I originally told you about the massive data breach at Global Payment, a third party credit card processing company that works with retailers as a middleman in the processing of credit card charges.  In the wake of the data breach which affected holders of about 1.5 million credit card holders, the company said that it would notify potentially affected people and provide credit monitoring and identity protection insurance free of charge.  However, such notifications have not yet happened as the company has still not completed its internal investigation.  Global payments has indicated that it will provide more information to the public by July 26th as its investigation proceeds.  Meanwhile both Visa and MasterCard are no longer using Global Payment for credit card processing.

TIPS

At the moment everyone should assume that they may have been affected by the Global Payment data breach and although there is no reason to panic, there is every reason to take steps to protect yourself from identity theft, such as carefully monitoring your credit card statement every month for unauthorized charges and putting a credit freeze on your credit report.  You can find more information about credit freezes elsewhere on this website.