Visa has confirmed that the credit card details of "a number" of Visa customers in the US and Europe have been stolen from a US-based firm.

Some affected customers have had their cards blocked and are now unable to take advantage of the Visa slogan "Anytime, anywhere, anyway".

The company said that it is cooperating with authorities in the US and had issued a fraud alert to its member banks. It did this as soon as it was informed of an "internal security breach" at the US firm.

A Visa International spokesman refused to identify the US firm, except to say that it is a 'merchant' rather than a 'retailer'. "This is not information that we can provide," he said.

On the number of cards affected, he said: "It was not something that we would define as large."

Visa has issued 1.2bn cards and handles $2.4tn worth of transactions worldwide, 3.9 million of them per day. Last February, a hacker gained access to five million accounts in the US.

The spokesman said that the decision to reissue compromised cards is up to its 21,000 member issuing banks which would decide on a case-by-case basis. Late last week 2,000 card holders in the Netherlands found their cards blocked.

Coincidentally, yesterday the company was trumpeting the success of its secure online payment service, "Verified by Visa", which has been adopted by 80 percent of US banks and has been rolled out over Europe during the last year.

Yahoo News

This is becoming a nasty business, hacking. I just read that some on-line war game sites (Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, etc) had to cancel tens of thousands of gamers accounts and invalidate thousands of CD Keys because of hackers. This was posted on the Blizzard web site back in April (April 1, no joke), but I just heard of it 'cause I just bought Warcraft 3 this weekend and had problems installing it (unrelated).

Whatever happened to hacking in just to change your finals grade in high school, or launching a thermonuclear war???? Is nothing sacred any more???

According to official people, hackers do it because they are sad, lonely teenagers with nothing better to do.