According to reports, hackers are finding a way to gain access to people's Starbucks mobile accounts and triggering the auto-reload function, thereby giving them access to the users' debit and credit card data.
A woman in Orlando, according to a CNBC report, noticed that $34.77 in value from her account had been transferred to another card. When the $25 reload kicked in, the criminals transferred it out of her account again. They then upped the reload rate to $75 and went back for more.
A man in Sugar Land, TX had a similar experience, according to CNN. After going to Starbucks he suddenly found himself getting alerts from PayPal notifying him that his card was continually being reloaded $50 at a time. He wound up getting 10 notices in a 10-minute period.
With 16 million customers using the Starbucks mobile app, concerns around the security of the card are clearly a major concern for the coffee chain. For its part, Starbucks maintains the app has not been hacked. Instead, the company claims that occasional reports from consumers such as those on CNBC and CNN are typically the result of hackers gaining access to their Starbucks card through other accounts that have the same user name and passwords.
Photo: Starbucks