Renewed your TV licence? Your banking data may not be secure
If you’ve renewed your TV licence recently it may have cost you more than you budgeted for.
TV Licensing has written to 40,000 people to warn them to check for suspicious transactions or amended direct debits after their banking details weren’t protected online properly.
People who entered their bank account and sort code details – as well as names, addresses and emails – on TV Licensing’s website between 29 August and 5 September are at risk, with the organisation failing to encrypt the data.
Debit and credit card details aren’t affected, however, after a technical update temporarily removed encryption from TV Licensing’s payment process. It took the site down for a number of days to fix the problem.
A spokeswoman said: “While there is no evidence that anyone’s data has been compromised, for a limited period certain transactions carried out on our website were not as secure as they should have been. This has now been fixed.
“While the risk of anyone having seen any of this data is low, because we take data security seriously we’ve written to people who may have sent their bank details to our website during this period to alert them and advise them to speak to their bank if they see any unusual activity. The issue did not affect credit or debit card details which were encrypted throughout.”