Retail giant Boots has suspended payments made using its Advantage Cards following a cyber security attack.
Boots said there was suspicious activity on some of the loyalty card accounts, but promised none of its own systems were compromised.
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In a statement, Boots said: “Our customers’ safety and security online is very important to us. We can confirm we are writing to a small number of our customers to tell them that we have seen fraudulent attempts to access boots.com accounts. These attempts can be successful if people use the same email and password details on multiple accounts.
“We would like to reassure our customers that these details were not obtained from Boots. We are aware that other organisations may be impacted too.
“As an extra precaution we have temporarily stopped payment by Boots Advantage Card points on boots.com or in store. This removes the ability for people to attempt to access any Boots accounts, but means that customers will not be able to use Boots Advantage Card points to pay for products in store and online for a short period of time.”
A Boots spokeswoman told the BBC the issue affected less than 1% of the company’s 14.4m active Advantage Cards – around 150,000 accounts.
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By GlobalDataCustomers can still use their Advantage Cards to collect points while the issue is being resolved.
Loyalty programme fraud
This comes after loyalty programme fraud increased by 89% in 2019. According to e-commerce fraud prevention tech specialists Forter, the most significant attacks include:
- Account takeover: Fraudsters hack into member accounts, exploiting accumulated points and payment instruments saved in the account;
- New account fraud: Fraudsters create fake accounts, often using stolen identities, and use them to accumulate, store, sell, and redeem stolen points, and
- Policy abuse: Consumers overshare coupons or promotional codes, violating merchant policies and illegitimately gaining programme rewards.
Forter’s research finds that too many merchants are simply unprepared to protect their loyalty programmes. Forter notes that 42% of merchants state that they do not have the skills required to prevent fraud and abuse.
In addition, almost 50% report insufficient resources, and that loyalty programme account fraud prevention is considered a low organisational priority.
