Western Union, Englewood, CO, began notifying 15,700 customers this weekend that their credit and debit card data had been accessed by a hacker who found its Web site unprotected during maintenance on September 8, according to reports.
Reports said that the site was accidentally left unprotected by Western Union systems employees who performed maintenance on it.
In a statement, a company spokesman said that no cases of credit card fraud had been reported as of yet and that Visa International and MasterCard International had been alerted to the situation.
The Western Union Web site was put up in June, however, an official launch was supposed to take place this month. A spokesman said that as a result of the hacking, the launch will probably be pushed back.
Internal and External investigations are reportedly in progress.
Western Union, a money transfer and electronic payment company, is a unit of Atlanta-based First Data Corp., which provides a number of debit, credit, and merchant transaction processing services.
