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From: Ed_Greenberg@fin.3mail.3com.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: ATM at Retailers
Message-ID: <12646@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 26 Sep 90 15:46:00 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 682, Message 9 of 13


Jim Budler <jimb@silvlis.com> writes:

>Last year I was one of the lucky people to receive a letter telling me
>that my Versateller card was being shut down, and that I would receive
>a new one in a few days. Concurrently my HomeBanking stopped also.

>This shutdown occurred because some people at one of the system
>providers broke their trust and obtained a significant block of
>records containing names, ATM numbers and PINs. By system providers I
>mean the companies like Plus System, or Star, who connect to the

John Higdon's gonna love this one...

The Bank of America customer group that had their Versatel cards
invalidated were that subset that had used an ATM in Safeway
Supermarket.  Safeway ATM's are provided by an organization called
GTEL, a service of -- you guessed it -- GTE!

The scope of the breach was not known, but everybody who had a GTEL
transaction in a particular time period was uncerimoniously dumped
from the Versatel system and then sent the mailings that Jim Budler
described.  Since Versatel numbers are used to log into Homebanking,
that service was lost as well, even though Homebanking passcodes are
not the same as the Versatel PIN.

It was inconvenient, to say the least, although no money was ever
stolen using the purloined information, and _the_bank_says_ that the
perps were apprehended.


edg