I know someone who got a letter about the data breach with TJX. She hasn't heard anything since. It's like they forgot about the consumers in this data breach.

I have been trying to find out how to get on the consumer class action. I found a website of a lawfirm that supposedly was handling it but they won't answer email.

@davebg5: Wow, there's bad math and then there's six orders of magnitude bad math.

@davebg5: Um, $40,000,000 divided by 100,000,000 = 40 cents per card. Sorry.

And it's not the cost of operational changes. It's the cost of every issuing bank replacing and/or fixing customer cards and accoutns.

@Beerad: $40 million divided by 100 million cards = $400k per card.

Since the breach was on the retailer's side of things, it's not as if Visa had any operational changes to make. Their costs are pretty much tied to notifications, investigations of alleged misuse and reissuing new cards.

I find it hard to believe that it ran Visa $400k to do this for each card/customer.

@Beerad: Just for clarity, my card replacement was not related to T.J. Maxx in any way. Citibank actually refused to disclose any information about the "potential breach", which was irritating because I was wildly curious (never had any fraudulent charges or other issues on my account) but I can understand their position.

@ekthesy: Different settlement. Customers may end up getting hosed in their related settlement, as per [consumerist.com], but it's a different piece.

But how much were individuals with stolen credit card numbers actually damaged? Citibank sent me a letter one day with a new card saying that my old one "might" have been compromised, and they were switching my account to a new number. Sure it was a minor pain swapping all of my auto-payments to a new card, but it wasn't exactly something that required monetary compensation.

But we can't really tell how much money Visa and the issuing banks are "making" off of the settlement. If up to 100 million cards were exposed, that's a whole lot of expense for the companies to go through to issue new cards, notify all affected customers, track down suspected fraud cases, etc. I strongly doubt that the upshot of all of this is any profit for the affected companies.

Love how Visa is making money off credit card fraud.

I recently read an article about these data breaches (I wish I could remember where I read it) and it pretty much said that the credit card companies don't force retailers to increase their data security b/c all of the fines that they get to impose when there is a breach are yet another source of money making fees for the banks.

I'd say $40.9 million is a nice haul for Visa.

I wonder if TJX is going to pay the card issuers in coupons and after-hours sales. They are as good as cash, you know.