About 56,000 members of Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union have been notified that their debit card accounts were exposed to fraud.

It is the latest casualty of last year's breach of Heartland Payment Systems, one of the country's largest credit card processors, where information from more than 100 million credit and debit card transactions was exposed.

Not until the end of May did Suncoast discover that some of its customers who use Visa Check Cards could be in danger. The Tampa credit union is issuing new cards to all members whose accounts were compromised.

"It was not a Suncoast exclusive event nor was it through any fault of our own," said Melva McKay-Bass, senior vice president of member service operations for Suncoast. "It was not anything that we had done wrong."

Suncoast, which has more than 450,000 members, has determined that less than 1,000 members were actually affected by fraud as of Wednesday, McKay-Bass said.

Only encrypted card data was compromised, not personal information such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers. The credit union began notifying affected members by letter in the first week of June, McKay-Bass said. Suncoast released a statement explaining the breach Friday in response to what it said was an inaccurate Fox News report that, McKay-Bass said, panicked some of its members...

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Posted by John B. Frank Thursday, June 18, 2009

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