Hundreds of Sundre financial institution clients were affected by a compromised point of sale terminal at an undisclosed Sundre business last week.
Nicci Doyle, branch manager at the Mountain View Credit Union, said roughly 250 to 300 members of the branch had been hit. These members had used their cards at the business. She was notified of the information on Monday afternoon last week from the union's security department. She then contacted the members immediately to let them know and have their cards replaced.
“We as a credit union did everything we could in order to protect our members,” said Doyle.
Monica St. Dennis, branch manager at the ATB Financial in town, said she was alerted from another financial institution of the news on Monday morning.
“On Monday morning we proceeded to contact 250 ATB customers to indicate that there may be the possibility of cards being compromised,” said St. Dennis.
“We have since confirmed that they have not been compromised.”
Staff members have replaced a large number of customer bank cards, she said.
Jenifer Kleinknecht, assistant branch manager at the Bank of Montreal in town, said she was not formally informed of the situation. However, members of the bank were affected and a large number of cards have been replaced.
She explained that if a card is compromised, it means that no one has access to the account.
Young Song, the manager of Joko Convenience Store in town, posted a sign on the store's entrance door after noticing that certain cards weren't working on Monday.
The sign read that ATB Financial, Bank of Montreal and Mountain View Credit Union cards were not working at that time. He said the cards were working again by Wednesday.
At Sobeys, lines were snipped on Monday morning, causing the terminal to shut down.
“We did have some lines cut at the store, but when they were cut of course no debit card or credit card transactions could go through,” said Marty Mennear, co-owner of Sobeys.
He said everything was back up and running within about six hours.
Sundre RCMP officers are investigation the situation, according to Cpl. Ryan Hodge.
Meanwhile, on a separate occasion at Sobeys, transactions were being duplicated last week, as early as Saturday, Aug. 10.
“There was a few cards that had multiple transactions at the store here and it was just to do with our service provider, Paymentech,” explained Mennear.
“We phoned them about it and they were supposed to resolve any issues between 28 and 48 hours,” he said.
The issue was happening across Canada at various Sobeys locations.
“It just didn't happen in Sundre. It was an issue with Sobeys across Canada,” he said, adding that this situation has nothing to do with the compromised cards situation.
On Thursday afternoon, Barkley Carrier from Sobeys posted on Facebook's popular page ‘Sundre and area buy and sell' that transactions were being duplicated.
“Just thought I would let everyone know that yes there was a problem with debit cards being charged duplicate transactions this week,” reads the post. “This was not a skimming incident, but rather a software problem with Paymentech, our debit processor.”
