Hasbro addesses fan concerns over credit card fraud with Fun Publications

HunterPR, Hasbro’s PR firm, released the following statement regarding the cyber-security issues experienced by Fun Publications over the past few months:

“To the G.I. Joe and Transformers fan communities and Fun Publications customers,

Thank you for bringing your concern to our attention and for giving Hasbro the opportunity to respond to a matter that impacts its G.I. Joe and Transformers brands.  Please know we take all consumer concerns very seriously and are in regular contact with Fun Publications (our licensee) about the possibility of a breach in security to their online purchasing system for the G.I. Joe and Transformers Collectors’ Clubs.  Fun Publications is also taking this matter very seriously and is diligently working at identifying any problems, the number of customers affected and ways to ensure it does not happen to any more customers. Hasbro wants consumers to have a positive experience at all touch points for its brands, including transactions with its licensees.  As such, we are confident that Fun Publications has detailed instructions and pertinent information available for those consumers who believe they may have been targeted by credit theft via their portals.

Based on our extensive conversations with the Fun Publications team Hasbro wants to convey the following to the fan communities:

Fun Publications has assured us that they are taking necessary measures to curb additional issues, and they are working with third party experts to identify the problem.  They anticipate knowing and communicating the cause of the breach as soon as possible to those affected.

– They believe that the number of customers affected is low relative to the volume of sales transactions made.

– However, if you believe fraudulent charges have been made to your credit card after making a purchase with any portals for the G.I. Joe or Transformers Collectors’ Clubs, we urge you to contact Fun Publications immediately and provide them with the information requested at https://www.transformersclub.com/tccccinfo.cfm or http://gijoeclub.com/ccinfo.cfm by using the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of these pages.

– Fun Publications can also be reached at the following number for additional consumer affairs inquiries relating to the G.I. Joe and Transformers Collectors’ Clubs at (817) 448-9863 during regular business hours.

– As more information becomes available, they will be contacting all affected customers who have notified them about the issue.

Thank you again to all of the fans of our Transformers and G.I. Joe brands for their continued support and for the opportunity to respond to this matter.”

Fun Publications also mentioned the following information on their Facebook page:

As we continue to work on our systems, you will see some of our services go offline and then come back, so please be patient as we preserve data and clone servers and websites.

We are also taking this opportunity to remove all non-essential services from our ecomerce server. So in the short term in the next day or so, the club forums will be discontinued. It will be several days until we are ready to bring them back under an entierly new piece of software. I know alot of you have been asking for this so, we have decided to replace several of our systems with new packages. This means that you will not have access to the forum for a while at all. We do plan to make the old forum viewable (no posts) in the future.

Since we do not know exactly what data was taken, we are recommending that if your have used common logins or passwords with our system and any other system that your change your passwords in those systems immidiately (especially any financial sysstems)! We will be resetting all of the passwords in our system very soon. Please don’t delay in changing your passwords in other locations.

In addition, we have found a few recent aticles concerning security issues with other vendors. If you use these services, these issues could possibly impact you. Please read the attached links:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/10/itunes-hack-unauthorized-charges-apple_n_1268593.html?

http://www.greenpois0n.co/itunes-accounts-being-hacked-to-steal-money-from-store-credit.html

Thanks for your support in this difficult time. We will continue to work with our vendors to correct the issues and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused any of our members.

JBL will continue to provide updates as this situation develops.