Lloyds' Avios Reward credit cardholders report fraudulent activity

Concerns raised over data breach

Thousands of Lloyds Avios Rewards American Express credit card customers have been targeted by fraudsters, the bank has admitted.

Reports first emerged on air miles site Head for Points, where readers asked if the credit card had suffered a major data breach.

One said: "About a week ago my wife's Lloyds Avios Amex card was used fraudulently by someone over in New York for a few different things so we called Lloyds to talk about this and get the card cancelled and a replacement sent out."

After contacting Lloyds, he said the bank informed him it was getting thousands of calls a day and was seeing a lot of fraud on Amex cards.

Another said: "Same for me – queued for 45 mins on Saturday afternoon to speak to the fraud team after my card was declined – there was an attempted US transaction on there. And spoke to a colleague this week with the Lloyds Avios Amex whose card had also stopped working. There's clearly been a massive leak somewhere..."

A Lloyds spokeswoman said: “A very small number of Lloyds Bank Avios Rewards American Express credit card customers have been affected by recent fraudulent activity. This has affected less than one percent of customers who hold these cards and we have introduced additional controls to provide further protection.

"These controls have been successful in ensuring that fraudulent transactions are identified and declined. We apologise to customers for any inconvenience caused. Impacted customers will receive a full refund of monies that have been taken fraudulently.”

Earlier this week, customers of Lloyds Banking Group and TSB were shut out of their online banking – for the second time this month.

At the start of the year, the UK-based group fell victim to a DDoS that led to a two-day outage. Several more glitches followed throughout the year. ®