NEW YORK, June 17 (UPI) -- MasterCard International said Friday more than 40 million credit card accounts, including 13.9 million MasterCards, may have been subjected to fraud.
The company said the accounts might have been exposed through a security breach at a third-party payment processing company, The New York Times reported.
MasterCard issued a statement saying its analysts and law enforcement officials had identified a security problem at CardSystems Solutions. The Tucson, Ariz.-based company processes more than $15 billion a year in Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards -- as well as online debit and electronic transfer transactions for small to midsize merchants and financial institutions, The Times said.
MasterCard said an unauthorized person managed to exploit the security hole to gain access to CardSystems' network. MasterCard said Social Security numbers and other information that might be used in identity theft are not stored on its cards, but fraudulent charges could be made on credit card accounts accessed through the security breach.
It was not clear yet when the breach occurred, or whether the person or persons responsible for it have been identified, the paper said.
