The County Clare based company Loyaltybuild has fallen victim to a large scale data breach which has lead to a massive Garda investigation being launched. The company manages customer loyalty schemes in Ireland and throughout Europe and the data breach is said to have been one of the most sophisticated data theft operations ever seen in Europe.

It was confirmed yesterday by the office of the Data Protection Commissioner that the details of over 500,000 people have potentially been corrupted by the data breach. The details of 376,00 people throughout Europe, of which 70,000 of those are in Ireland had been compromised after criminals hacked into the security systems of Loyaltybuild.

The Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawks was speaking on Newstalk 106 this morning and strongly advised people who have any concerns to examine their credit card details from the past month. It has been suggested yesterday that people should check their statements from the past two years but Mr. Hawks said that was not necessary.

Mr. Hawks also said that the Data Protection Office have taken strict measures to tackle this recent cyber crime and advised customers to be vigilant from now on “We’ve made  sure that banks have been alerted so they can be monitoring the credit cards for any unusual transactions either now or going into the future. The point to be alerted there is that if people are getting strange phonecalls pretending to be from  Supervalu, Axa or their credit card company, just to be very careful as it seems the hackers would have access to that information as well.”