Huddle House Reports Point of Sale Hacked Since August 2017

If you had a meal at Huddle House and used a payment card -- you might want to give the issuing financial institution a call (or review your account online) and make sure your financial health wasn't compromised! Huddle House announced that the compromise occurred from the beginning of August 2017 until "present."

It always amazes me how long compromises go on without being detected. In this case, it was well in excess of a year!

Huddle House is a casual dining and fast food chain that operates in the southeastern United States. On 02/01/2019, they announced that their point of sale system had been hacked on the main page of their website. 

Huddle House reported that the following personal details were compromised:

"Based on the facts known to Huddle House at this time, the malware was designed to collect certain payment card information from the magnetic stripe, including cardholder name, credit/debit card number, expiration date, cardholder verification value, and service code."

The page also details all the resources available to protect yourself. 

Please note that some people opt for "paid services" to protect their financial resources, but you can also do it yourself for free. 

Free credit reports are available at AnnualCreditReport.Com and the Federal Trade Commission has great information on how to deal with any issue that arises from using your card at Huddle House.

In the United States, billions of dollars of payment card fraud are incurred by customers, banks, and merchants a year. The biggest losers are the merchants, but we can assume that we are all paying for it when these losses are passed down to the consumer via higher prices and fees.

Please note that there are varying estimates of the true cost of fraud. Based on years of personal experience, I have always found that large amounts of fraud loss are buried as "bad debt" because no one (normally a Collections Department or Fraud Department) spent the time to investigate the true cause of the loss. 

The sad thing is that when this happens, fraud losses tend to go up because no one is effectively mitigating the root cause of how the money is being stolen.