As well as airline insolvencies, 2018 will be remembered as a year when numerous major airlines were hit by cyber criminals, with valuable passenger data stolen. Air Canada and Cathay Pacific were hit, as well as British Airways, which said at the time: "From 22:58 BST 21 August 2018 until 21:45 BST 5 September 2018…
Continue reading: Russian Hackers Selling Stolen British Airways Customer Data
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
After the Equifax hack, I think virtually every American's info is avail for sale on the dark web. Not much we can do about it.
"..it is also very worrying to think my personal information is for sale, especially for such a low price." I like your posts James but I'll admit I got a laugh out of this line! hehe
Why do you think they wanted to perform the hack in the first place? Of course it was going to end up for sale.
Sadly par for the course nowadays.
I had some Russia-based fraud on the card saved to my BA profile a month or so back. It was caught relatively quickly.
What makes you certain that these people really have the BA data rather than just being fraudsters?
Though, if you believe that, I have access to six million dollars in unclaimed tax rebates from the Nigerian government and wondered if you’d be willing to facilitate their transfer for a risk-free fee of 37%...
I wonder how much credit card fraud results from these thefts. Even with travel notifications, my card companies often attempt to block my own purchases while away from home unless I text them back. Yesterday, Google informed me that there was an attempt to hack into my home security system that they shut down. The banks and other companies are getting very good at preventing fraud, almost too good, in some cases.
I just started a trip on Saturday only to discover that my AMEX card had been hacked. The fraud people discovered one charge of $1500 for gift cards that was blocked and my card was blocked. So now I have no AMEX card for my hotel payments and AMEX was not able to send a card to my holiday hotel because their "systems were down". I assume that this is the BA card hack.
I had changed my card account password on receipt of the email from BA but it didn't stop the hack.
Not pleased
Question is, I am getting reports now from Equafax (just yesterday) that fraudsters are now taking into frequent flyer accounts and selling the miles. Do airlines cover you for those losses or are you just SOL if this happens to you? if OMAAT can write and article on this topic it would be very helpful to us readers!
James, I thought I read that BA were going to pay for a watch service on credit files of affected people?
@azamaraal same problem for me but at least Amex could send me a replacement. The platinum Amex I had stored in my BA profile (I really only use that card for airfares) started firing off alerts Friday night while I was traveling for someone trying to buy Apple gift cards. I called Amex and blocked the card, they reissued it and had a new one to my hotel in Europe on Tuesday. The whole thing is mainly just an annoying hassle and not very profitable for the fraudsters as all the charges were blocked anyway.
We received the notice from BA that our card was compromised. Just yesterday, that card had several fraudulent charges. Now did the criminals using our card # get the card details from BA, a skimmer, or somewhere else? Impossible to know.
first time ever posting on OMAAT (daily reader here, great job, guys)
BA never notified me of my card being hacked but a short while after the news of the data theft I was charged $1,761 from "Iberia" which was not detected and posted to my CSR account (they never question any charges) and i had to call them to dispute the charge. i hope they figured out this was linked to the BA data theft.
no problems... yet. I had to cancel and replace my CSR countless times due to Uber frauds but so far so good with CSR that has covered for me every time. any day now they may pull the signature close on my account