In recent days, we have experienced a significant increase in the number of fraudulent purchase transactions attempted on our site. Our internal protocols identified suspicious transactions within minutes, and we have liaised continually with our payment processors to flag these transactions, and, in cases when payments were made successfully, to issue full refunds immediately.
While our own internal investigation is ongoing, we have so far found no evidence that our systems have been compromised in any way, and no customer data is or was at risk. We stress that, as all payments are processed by our third-party payment providers outside of our web systems, no vulnerable financial data is ever stored directly on our servers.
Nevertheless, we take the protection of our systems and of our customers very seriously, and we have therefore decided to implement the following security measures:
- guest purchases are no longer possible, with immediate effect
- email verification for new accounts, to be implemented within 28 days
- two-factor authentication on account login, to be implemented within 28 days
We appreciate that these measures will cause some inconvenience to legitimate customers, both new and existing; we apologise that this is necessary, and thank you for your patience and understanding.
