Boston Globe & Worcester T&G print credit card numbers on paper bundles

Here’s the original article announcing the massive mistake…

Credit and bank card numbers of as many as 240,000 subscribers of The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette were inadvertently distributed with bundles of T&G newspapers on Sunday, officials of the newspapers said yesterday.

The confidential information was on the back of paper used in wrapping newspaper bundles for distribution to carriers and retailers. As many as 9,000 bundles of the T&G, wrapped in paper containing subscribers' names and their confidential information, were distributed Sunday to 2,000 retailers and 390 carriers in the Worcester area, said Alfred S. Larkin Jr., spokesman for the Globe.

More: Subscriber credit data distributed by mistake - The Boston Globe.

The next day the paper setup a hotline staffed with over 200 people and a web site to let people know who may ahve been effected: www.bostonglobe.com/cclookup. If you are a subscriber of the Boston Globe or Worcester T&G go to that web page and type in your phone number and zip code. If you are effected, it will give you instructions. The hotline number is 888-665-2644.

Categories: identitytheft, idtheft, fraud