BLOG by zaiss

It’s amazing how you can pair two disparate things and come up with a killer post title…

When I moved to Pittsburgh, I joined DSW’s “Reward Your Style” program… what did I have to lose? Another random value card to put in my wallet, and I’d occasionally get some free shoes.

About a month ago, I got a postcard from DSW in the mail advertising the sale:

Now I’m not sure what this ad says to you… but to me, it says, “Hey, females, shoes are on sale, come buy them all.” Admittedly, I don’t know what percentage of DSW Rewards customers are females, but I know for a fact that there are males in the prorgram (me, perhaps). Even if women are 90% of DSW’s Rewards customers, the stereotype that women buy lots of shoes is trite and frankly, somewhat sexist. Plus, am I really supposed to be motivated to go buy shoes now? The least they could do is put some nice men’s shoes on an alternative advertisement and send that out the males in their program. They should keep track of Rewards customers’ gender, right?

After all, they track credit and debit card numbers used in Rewards purchases.

Let me back up. This post was originally going to be center around the silly, ineffective ad that DSW put out to its Rewards customers. Hilarious antics would ensue. Surely. But tonight, I got a letter from the DSW execs. Apparently, the company has recently joined the group of companies who have had their customer records stolen by identity thieves. The estimate is that 1.4 million customer records were stolen from the store.

The letter informed me that I was one of the lucky 1.4 million. As if my day wasn’t stressful enough…

So DSW is serving up a side of identity theft with their crap advertisements. But the DSW execs apologized for the inconvenience, and pointed out how quickly they had notified me of the debit card number theft. Forgive and forget, right? Hardly. First of all, why is DSW tracking my debit card number whenever I make a purchase? All they need to do is assign me a number, track how many shoes I buy, and give me free shoes when I buy sufficiently many shoes. That doesn’t involve any personal information whatsoever – if all I was to them was a number, I’d be quite happy with that.

Secondly, why on earth wasn’t DSW’s customer database secure? Is that how highly they think of their prized Rewards customers? For that matter, what are they doing to rectify the problem now that it has reared it’s ugly head? They mentioned that they are tracking down the offenders and will “prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law” (I’m holding my breath), but that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good. I’ve already taken steps to fix DSW’s sloppy mistake. They need to be bending over backwards to assure me that it won’t happen again. A free pair of shoes wouldn’t be so bad either.

Enough ranting and raving, time for some facts. Readers, pay attention. As of the receipt of my letter, Visa and MasterCard had notified DSW of the names that went along with the stolen debit card numbers. If you have been to DSW since November 2003 and paid with another credit card (or with a check), your information might have been stolen too.

If you find that your records were stolen, the first step is to call the number on the back of the card. I ended up cancelling my debit card and ordering a new one to prevent the number from being used fraudulently. Then double and triple check recent transactions to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks since the theft. And finally (thanks to Braden for this suggestion), check your credit report in a month or so and make sure that nobody has opened a new accounts in your name. Apparently DSW didn’t link personal info to the card numbers, but the letter clearly states that stolen information “included debit and credit card numbers,” which implies that more information was stolen. Better safe than sorry.