A Calgary family-owned printing company is struggling to rebuild its reputation and customer base after being targeted by a sophisticated scam.
Little Rock Printing was first notified of credit card fraud earlier in the year. His president, Brian Kroeker, said his team and outside consultants immediately began investigating the company's e-commerce website and decided to do a complete overhaul.
"We built a brand new site and launched it in March. It's amazing," Kroeker told Global News. "Problem solved."
In the end, he was too optimistic and the cheater was too quick. Halfway through the overhaul, the crooks were still able to break into the system, Kroeker said.
"They (the scammers) placed an order and as an order he dropped a PNG file that contained malware," he explained. "They went in for a moment and skimmed three weeks of data that hadn't been offline yet. They quickly skimmed and walked away."
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Read More: Alberta Small Business Managers question the security of a giant job search site on a discussion forum Reddit. The post asked if anyone had their credit card compromised after using the company's service, and there were multiple responses.
Most of the complaints centered on the fact that cards were compromised shortly after using the company's printing service.
Kroeker took to the forum to explain what happened, apologize, and state what the company has done to protect the information. Asked why it took him so long to reach out to customers, he said he had no idea how widespread the scam was.
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"We just finished our investigation and were targeting a group of people who we thought were in that window. he said. "The lesson is that we probably should have emailed everyone."
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We have significantly enhanced our services.
"Pre-pandemic, we were selling about 3% online," he said. "During the pandemic, we switched, and now we're about 99% online."
He added that he certainly doesn't regret the switch, but He added that he regretted the position that cyberattacks and other frauds could trap small business owners.
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"At the end of the day, we're on the victim's side. We build new websites, pay consultants, not to alleviate customer inconvenience, pain in the ass, or financial loss. , had to lose customers.”
Kroeker added that it is too early to know how many customers the business has lost. He just wants his clients to know that he has done all he can to mitigate further risk.
He also reminds others that fraud can happen to anyone. I want small and medium-sized enterprises to know about it.
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