Our holidays went by like a storm and a lot of shoppers are complaining about their credit card bills piling up especially this month as we're about to hit Christmas time.
You can still smile, folks. At least you won't be spending a gazillion dollars like Target this holiday season, Time reports.
That's correct. You heard it right. Target is expected to pay off about $39.4 million for a settlement with the banks. It is to make up for the losses of each financial institution after the retailer's massive data breach last 2013.
Here's what happened in the 2013 data breach:
The hackers allegedly used malware secretly set up on the stores' payment terminals. The purpose of this is to steal information and it went undetected for weeks. Records state that about 40 million credit card numbers were obtained and the personal data of 110 million customers were highly compromised. Since a lot of customer information was obtained through magnetic stripes of cards, this incident prompted the change to chip-and-PIN cards and initiated extensive concerns about hacking and identity theft.
The banks had to reimburse the victims of fraudulent purchases. They had to reissue customers a lot of credit and debit cards. Hence, these accounted for the loss of money.
Reuters' report says though that the settlement is still pending approval from court.
Banks lost money by reimbursing customers for fraudulent purchases and reissuing millions of credit and debit cards. The settlement still needs to get a final approval from the court, Reuters reported.
The retailer has instigated measures to prevent any recurrence of this incident. They want to make sure that they absolutely avert any circumstances that would lead to this again. That is why the company is among the very first U.S. retailers to make use of microchip-enabled card readers.
Well, Target certainly wants to make sure that everyone spends their holidays in a merry way this year.
