News - Play.com warns customers of details leak

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But etailer says payment card details are safe.

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Read more.

I barely use them anymore as their customer service is terrible, their delivery is slow and prices are cheaper elsewhere. I just wish I had of cancelled my account now . . . .

I didn't get any email!

I received this email, quite shocking really.

i recieved the email this morning on my current registered email address and on my old registered address too. I guess they dont discard email addresses when you change as i changed my email address about 5 months ago.

Hmm, I guess I'm glad my play.com account is registered to a gmail account which gets spammed anyway but I hope play.com get hit really hard for this, there's simply no excuse for losing data.
I'll be changing my password as a precaution but I hate the way play.com stores card details and bypasses the card company's extra verification layer (not the only one to operate like this, mind).
I also very rarely buy from them now, and this isn't exactly going to gain my business!

The actual breach wasn't at Play, but a company called Silverpop who Play use for marketing mailshots. It happened back in December, but I guess we're only now seeing the fruits of it in terms of the addresses having been sold on.

I haven't got any email myself, but that doesnt change the fact that this isn't good and my details could be amongst those affected. It is extra annoying as I haven't bought a great deal off there for a long time, as I've found things cheaper elsewhere. It is no longer a place of bargains, and delivery times can be quite slow.

Plaaay!

I see more info on this via my inbox:-

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Originally Posted by Play.com

Dear Customer,

As a follow up to the email we sent you last night, I would like to give you some further details. On Sunday the 20th of March some customers reported receiving a spam email to email addresses they only use for Play.com. We reacted immediately by informing all our customers of this potential security breach in order for them to take the necessary precautionary steps.

We believe this issue may be related to some irregular activity that was identified in December 2010 at our email service provider, Silverpop. Investigations at the time showed no evidence that any of our customer email addresses had been downloaded. We would like to assure all our customers that the only information communicated to our email service provider was email addresses. Play.com have taken all the necessary steps with Silverpop to ensure a security breach of this nature does not happen again.

We would also like to reassure our customers that all other personal information (i.e. credit cards, addresses, passwords, etc.) are kept in the very secure Play.com environment. Play.com has one of the most stringent internal standards of e-commerce security in the industry. This is audited and tested several times a year by leading internet security companies to ensure this high level of security is maintained. On behalf of Play.com, I would like to once again apologise to our customers for any inconvenience due to a potential increase in spam that may be caused by this issue .

Best regards,

John

John Perkins
CEO
Play.com

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So Silverpop have had a telling off / buck passed / scapegoat.

Nowhere in the privacy policy did I see anything about my details being passed to a third market spam, sorry, marketing company. So I stand by what I said.

From Play.com

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We have business and technical partners whom we share data with to handle orders, process credit and debit card payments and provide a range of services, including for fraud protection purposes. They are bound by Data Protection covenants and must process the personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and the Data Protection Laws of Luxembourg.

In case any fraudulent activity is detected on the website, or, without limitation, in connection with the breach of intellectual property rights through the use of the website, we may release personal information in order to comply with any applicable regulation or assert our rights as well as our business partners’.

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Customers are entrusting them with their data, so they have a responsibility to not 'lose' it, regardless of the lame excuses they make.

Well this goes to explain all the play spam emails i been getting lately.

Ah ha, this would explain my recent spam to my shopping inbox. I use a specific email account only for shopping which until the other day never had any spam. Its now been flooded with Argos, Tesco, ASDA and various other promotions when I am not registered with any of them.
Time to close and open another shopping inbox, until some other stupid store breaches my details when I never asked them to sell it in the first place.