On the 19th of August, Mastercard realised that customer data from its ‘priceless Specials’ loyalty scheme had been shared on the internet for what the Belgian Data Protection Authority labelled as “a certain period of time”.

The data breach compromised the names, payment card numbers, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, gender and dates of birth of many customers. Mastercard has said that a substantial amount of the victims are German. The Belgian authorities have also been notified because the company has its regional headquarters in Waterloo.

In a statement to Scottish Financial News, Mastercard said the breach “has no connection to Mastercard’s payment transaction network”.

A spokesperson said: “We can confirm there was an event involving the Specials loyalty platform in Germany managed by a third-party vendor, which resulted in the unauthorized distribution of certain information.

“We take privacy and security extremely seriously and are taking every possible step to investigate and resolve the issue. This includes informing and supporting those cardholders affected and immediately suspending the Specials platform, among other actions. This issue has no connection to Mastercard’s payment transaction network.”

Chairman of the Belgian Data Protection Authority, David Stevens, said: “We have received a lot of questions and complaints since the announcement of this incident, we want to reassure users: we have contacted Mastercard in order to get additional information, and are following this case closely together with the Hessian data protection authority and all the other possible concerned authorities.”