Important information about your account
Dear,
We are writing to let you know about an incident that may involve your personal information.
What happened?
On Friday 20th March we discovered an illegal unauthorised access to our network which includes 118118Money.com.
We regret to inform you that recordings of customer service calls were accessed by the criminals responsible for the cyber attack. As a result, we are writing to all of our customers to inform them of this.
For those customers who have called our customer service line, certain pieces of personal data could potentially be affected. This could include your name, address and date of birth or other personal information that was discussed as part of the calls with our customer service team. We believe that, since the data is held in the form of call recordings, it would be extremely time consuming for anyone to attempt systematically to extract or copy your personal information.
As things stand, we believe that the only data affected by this incident was the call recordings. We do not believe that our customer database itself has been affected.
What are we doing?
We take the protection of your confidential and personal information extremely seriously and I would like to reassure you that looking after our customers is always our highest priority. As soon as we became aware of the situation, we took the immediate step of taking our network offline and working with cyber security experts to ensure the security of both our network and data.
We have also been liaising with the relevant regulators and authorities to keep them informed and have reported the incident to the National Cyber Security Centre for further investigation, as well as to the Information Commissioner’s Office. We are making every effort to reintroduce our services and will provide full access to our Mobile App and services as soon as possible.
While we believe there is a low risk of your data being used fraudulently, we would like to offer you complimentary access to an identity fraud monitoring service for the next 12 months. We have purchased this service, Identity Plus, from Experian which helps detect possible misuse of your personal data.
While we believe only customers who have called our customer service line are potentially affected, we are offering Identity Plus Free for a period of 12 months to ALL our customers as a further precaution.
Your complimentary Experian Identity Plus membership
To register with Identity Plus, understand more about the product features and benefits, please visit https://identity.experian.co.uk/get-started/protection. Once on the website, please use your unique activation code and enter your details to complete the registration.
Your Identity Plus membership gives you:
- Unlimited access to your Experian Fraud Report.
- Credit Alerting – an email or SMS to let you know when certain changes happen on your Experian Credit Report, such as the addition of a new credit search.
- Web monitoring – an alert by email or SMS which confirms that personal information has been found on the dark web.
- Access to Experian’s Victims of Fraud service if you do become a victim of fraud, who will support you in resolving fraud that has occurred.
Please note that if you would like to use Identity Plus to for identity monitoring support, we kindly ask that you sign up for the service by 15th June 2020 as the code will automatically expire after that date.
Phishing
Customers should be aware that fraudsters may claim to be 118118 Money and attempt to contact you over phone or email. This is known as “phishing”. Please be aware that we will never call or email you to request your financial information. You should report any such requests to Action Fraud, the UK’s national fraud and cybercrime reporting centre on [0300 123 2040](tel:0300 123 2040).
Contacting us
If you have further questions or concerns about this incident, please contact our customer support team using the live chat function on our website, https://www.118118money.com/, between the hours of 11am and 5pm.
We are very sorry for any inconvenience and uncertainty you may face due to this incident. We remain indebted to you for choosing 118118Money and assure you that protection of your information is our first and foremost priority.
Yours sincerely,
Ali Chaudhry
CEO 118 118 Money
Please note this email address is not monitored. For additional help or questions please use the live chat function on our website, https://www.118118money.com/.
