Three arrested for Heartland breach
Monday, February 16, 2009
Three men were arrested late last week in connection with the Heartland Payment Systems data breach, which has reportedly affected at least 220 financial institutions.
Timothy J Johns, 21, Jeremy A Frazier, 20, and Tony Acreus, 20, were charged with grand theft and multiple counts of credit card fraud, according to police. The suspects were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida.
Sergeant Tony Drzewiecki told SCMagazineus.com the investigation is ongoing and may lead to more charges being placed on the suspects.
"There is no evidence that they were the masterminds of this breach. All that we were able to connect is that the credit card numbers were stolen in the hijacking of the records from the Heartland processing center," Drzewiecki said.
One website, SearchFinancialSecurity.com, reported the suspects were arrested "Monday night after using stolen credit card numbers for purchases at local Wal-Mart stores in the Tallahassee, Florida area."
Heartland announced news of its security breach on January 20th, the same day as the historic presidential inauguration. Recently, a lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New Jersey claiming the company knew of the breach months before and didn't alert customers.
BankInfoSecurity.com has kept an ongoing-tally of affected financial institutions from the breach, which is currently at 220.
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