Precautions mean US credit card fraud unlikely in New Zealand

The country's largest electronic transaction company says credit card transactions processed in New Zealand are "absolutely" safer than they are in the United States.

Paymark made the comment after revelations yesterday that about 13,000 New Zealanders' credit card details had been exposed and left vulnerable to fraud in one of the world's biggest data security breaches.

The breach happened at a US credit card transaction processing company, CardSystems Solutions.

A hacker infiltrated the firm's network and stole credit card information, including account names, numbers and expiry dates.

The security breach affected 40 million cards worldwide, 22 million of which were Visa cards and 14 million MasterCard cards.

CardSystems Solutions has since admitted it stored some credit card data in an unencrypted form and for longer than necessary. A criminal investigation is under way.

Paymark spokesman Darryl Roots said such a breach was unlikely at the two firms in New Zealand that process credit card transactions because data was stored in encrypted form.

Transactions here are processed by Paymark, which has 80 per cent market share and is owned by ASB Bank, BNZ, the National Bank and Westpac, and by ANZ-owned Eftpos New Zealand.

Mr Roots said consumers had added protection because the companies were owned by banks. "You've got a strong institutional bias towards infrastructure security," he said.

The firms operated under strict regulations imposed by the banks and were subject to bank audits.

Paymark Eftpos processes 700 million transactions a year, 30 per cent of which are credit card transactions.

Asked if credit card transactions processed in New Zealand were safer than in the United States, Mr Roots replied: "That absolutely is the case".

MasterCard has detected fraudulent activity on 1000 New Zealand cards and asked banks to cancel them.

The company initially thought the details of 2276 New Zealand cards had been compromised - not 5560 as reported yesterday.

Major incidents of fraud as a result of the security breach are yet to be detected here but the BNZ has found minor incidents it said could be related to the hacking.
Westpac is reissuing about 4000 credit cards as a precaution, and BNZ has identified 2800 at-risk cards and is offering to replace them free of charge. The ASB cancelled and reissued 100 cards yesterday, on top of 50 earlier in the week. ANZ and the National bank, which are owned by the same company, said they had only a few hundred customers affected. They were contacting them and recommending they replace their cards.

The country's busiest online trading site, TradeMe.co.nz, said the breach had not slowed business.