Heartland Payment Systems - Data Breach Class Action

Chimicles & Tikellis has been appointed to serve as interim co-lead counsel on behalf of a proposed class of banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions affected by the data breach at Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. (“HPS”) . On September 23, 2009, a consolidated amended complaint was filed against HPS.  The consolidated amended complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, where the cases against HPS brought by financial institutions have been transferred for consolidated or coordinated pre-trial proceedings.

HPS, a publicly traded company, processes credit and debit card transactions, and provides other services for over 250,000 businesses across the country, including restaurants and small retail stores. HPS reportedly handles approximately 100 million credit card transactions per month. HPS recently announced that certain data that it maintains in its processing systems had been accessed by outside hackers in 2008. It has been reported that this compromised information includes debit and credit card numbers, expiration dates, and internal bank codes. According to the complaint filed by C&T, HPS only became aware of the breach after it was notified of patterns of fraudulent credit card activity by Visa and MasterCard. This incident at HPS has already been described as the largest credit card data breach ever. Several incidents of actual fraud have already been reportedly linked to the Heartland data breach.

The consolidated complaint filed by C&T seeks relief on behalf of banks, financial institutions, credit unions, and other institutions that have issued debit and/or credit cards that were compromised in the Heartland data breach. The lawsuit seeks to recover the out of pocket expenses that were incurred by financial institutions that have re-issued debit and/or credit cards to their customers whose account information was comprised. The lawsuit also seeks damages on behalf of financial institutions that have incurred expenses that were caused by the actual misuse of the information that was compromised in the Heartland data breach.

If you have issued debit and/or credit cards that have been compromised as a result of the data breach at Heartland, please contact the attorneys below for additional information about the class action lawsuit that has been filed against Heartland on behalf of financial institutions.