77,000 Oregon residents were warned that their credit card information may have been stolen while visiting the Oregon Zoo. The breach occurred over six months, from December 2023 to June 2024, and affects 23,000 Washington residents.
The Maine Attorney General’s office announced the data theft last week, saying the credit card information of 118,000 people who visited the Oregon Zoo in the six-month period may have been stolen.
Repeated glitches in ticket sales raise suspicion
Oregon Zoo officials said they became suspicious when the third-party ticketing site repeatedly reported failed transactions.
An investigation was launched immediately and it took a month for the Oregon Zoo to realize that the credit card information of thousands of visitors may have been stolen.
According to Hova Najarian, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Zoo, the investigation revealed that an unauthorized individual redirected third-party credit card transactions for online ticket purchases, potentially stealing the information of thousands of zoo visitors.
The federal police were notified
After the zoo informed the federal police about the credit card violations, it closed its ticket counter and set up a new one.
Najarian says there have been no complaints from visitors about credit card thefts and that the Oregon Zoo has yet to calculate its financial losses from online ticket sales for the weeks its ticket sales service was down.
He confirmed that potential victims were notified and that the Oregon Zoo offered them free credit card monitoring for a year.
