Currency exchange Travelex has called in cyber security experts to contain a malware attack which has kept its systems offline for more than a week.
On New Year’s Eve, Travelex announced a “software virus” was discovered on its systems, which it immediately took offline.
Neither the website or app are currently operational, and the company doesn’t have an ETA of when they’ll be back online saying only that it’s doing all it can to restore services.
“We have deployed teams of IT specialists and external cyber security experts who have been working continuously since New Year’s Eve to isolate the virus and restore affected systems,” the company said in a statement.
Travelex added that there is “no indication that any personal or customer data has been compromised”.
The outage has affected customers who have been unable to use Travelex cards with pre-loaded currency for payments during the peak Christmas holiday season.
More than 1,200 branches worldwide are now providing foreign exchange services manually.
Customers vent
Angry customers have vented their frustrations on social media, saying they have been kept in the dark, with a notice on the site saying the service is “temporarily unavailable due to planned maintenance”.
This is just not good enough. No updates and your website just has a Server error page. I think you haven’t told the customers the full story. Just come clean. Ransomware perhaps? When you are back on-line I am getting all my money off my travelcard. Appaling customer service.
— Rob James (@RobJame25573693) January 3, 2020
Travelex customer David Martin contacted Information Age to say the call centre is still telling affected customers the issue relates to a system update.
“However, as a financial systems developer I know all too well that updates in production are never longer than a few minutes to an hour or two, and are staggered if multiple systems are affected,” Martin said.
“The support team are also unable to supply any information about the exchange rate you may get when you use the back-up BPay system as they cannot see any real time rates.
“To top this off the back up BPay system also charges 1% commission while the Travelex BPay system is free.”
In an email exchange seen by Information Age, Travelex has said it will credit Martin back the 1% BPay commission “until this issue is reolved”.
Martin said he is in the process of withdrawing the bulk of his funds.
“We are in a situation where we have two weeks of travel left and have concerns we will run out of foreign currency.”
Have you been affected by the Travelex outage? Let us know in the comments below.
