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Egghead Customer? Your Data Goes To Fry's

Posted by timothy on from the fry'd-eggheads dept.

An anonymous reader says: "I bought some things from onsale.com, which then became egghead.com. Somewhere in that time, their credit card database got jacked, for which they sent me a nice e-mail saying everything was ok. Now I've got a mail that I don't like at all, with the subject 'IMPORTANT MESSAGE REGARDING THE TRANSFER OF YOUR CUSTOMER INFORMATION.' Well. that's pretty much it. egghead.com info will go to Fry's Electronics, unless the customer explicitly requests that it not. How often does it happen that when a company goes under that they just sell their customer info and just not tell anyone?" Here are links to the Egghead info page and privacy and security policy.

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. I got this email also by eap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My personal info was stolen some time back and was used fraudulently to purchase some items at egghead.com

    I tried the link to opt out, but you have to have a user id and password to do this! I don't have them because the criminal who stole my CC created them.

    As a result, there is no way for me to get them to remove my personal info, which wasn't supposed to be in their database in the first place!

    Egghead.com was also cracked about a year or so ago. They have a very poor track record of safeguarding their customers' information.

    Things like this make me want stricter privacy controls for personal information.

    1. Re:I got this email also by eap · · Score: 5, Informative
      There are 16 digits in your average Mastercard. (More in Amex, less in Visa). With 16 digits, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible different numbers (give or take an order of magnitude). There are 100,000,000 people in the USA (again, give or take an order of magnitude). What are the odds that a randomly generated number is a real one?
      You have apparently never purchased anything over the phone. In addition to the credit card number, you must also supply an expiration date and at least a billing address zip code (sometimes street address).

      Let's see:

      (1^15 credit card numbers) * (1^5 zip codes) * (roughly 48 expiration dates over a 4 year card life) = NO CHANCE IN HELL OF GUESSING IT RANDOMLY

  2. CC# are not very random at all by Mad+Marlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Credit card numbers are not as random as you might think. A good overview can be found at this site.

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