- Police and spokespeople from Hannaford and Sweetbay both confirm that electronic "hackers" successfully navigated around the company's security firewall in early 2008. The breach was reported as "an incredibly sophisticated scheme" by Hannaford's spokeswoman at the time of the event. The hackers were able to gain access to credit card account numbers and expiration dates on consumers' cards from the first three months of the year 2008.
- The hackers essentially gained control of roughly 4.2 million account numbers. Out of this number, roughly 1.6 million of these numbers belong to customers at Sweetbay stores in the Florida area. While initial reports suggested that the fallout had been contained to less than 2,000 incidents of fraudulent card usage, reports from later in the year pointed to isolated cases of identity theft and credit fraud.
- Hannaford and Sweetbay spokespeople were quick to fix the security problem and beef up its electronic firewall. However, along with police encouragement, the spokespeople from the company urged its clientele to check their banking accounts and credit card accounts for irregular activity.
- The clearinghouse firms--like VISA, Discover and MasterCard--all were quick to mention that fraudulent charges would not be the responsibility of the customers. These companies directed all affected consumers to their fraud monitoring departments to handle any incident reports. The companies also promised to issue new account numbers to all affected consumers as well as any unaffected, yet concerned, consumers.
- In July 2008, an incident involving stolen gas at a Wal-Mart in Florida was connected to the Sweetbay credit card breach. The apprehended suspects were using fraudulent cards and numbers to purchase excessive quantities of fuel for resale--thereby converting the stolen credit into cash. There have been scattered reports since the incident first broke, but the worst of the scam seems to have run its course.
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