JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — There have been multiple reports of hackers gaining access to Walmart Spark accounts, leaving many customers with unauthorized charges linked to walmart.com.
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Action News Jax Reporter Nicholas Brooks was a victim of this attack.
Like many others, Brooks had to cancel his bank card after seeing a charge he didn’t make. Here’s what happened.
On January 13th, he got an alert from my bank.
It said he made a $528.04 purchase from Walmart.com. He clicked the link and was taken directly to his Walmart account. When he checked his bank account, there was a pending charge of $528.04.
He immediately contacted his bank to dispute the charge and start the process of replacing his debit card.
Later, we learned this was part of a larger security issue at Walmart, where hackers gained access to over a hundred Spark accounts, according to reports.
He spoke with Eric Franklin, a cybersecurity expert with The Scarlet Group, who confirmed the steps he took were the right steps.
“You did exactly what any average consumer was supposed to do,” Franklin said.
Franklin explained that some customers don’t realize they’ve been hacked for days, or even months.
“There’s a step you took that was even better, which is setting up alerts with your bank to make sure that whenever there’s a purchase made with that debit card, you get alerts,” he said.
Regions Bank issued a statement saying,
“Fraud prevention is a continuous focus at Regions Bank. We’re always working to identify suspicious transactions, and we encourage customers to be on guard, too. Scammers target retailers and banks of all sizes, and one-way banks step in to help protect customers is to reissue a customer’s card if we see instances of likely fraud. We have fraud-prevention advice available to everyone at www.regions.com/stopfraud and on the Fraud Prevention section of our company news website.”
“Banks work closely, with their security team of the retailers to try and figure out ways to mitigate this type of threat,” Executive Vice President of Risk, Fraud, and Cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association, Paul Benda said.
This hack doesn’t just target your bank card, but any card linked to your Walmart account. Benda offered this advice.
“What’s really easy for people to do is just track their accounts and track their statements really closely,” he said.
We reached out to Walmart for comment, but we did not receive a response before this story aired.
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