BR woman sues Albertsons

• By BILL LODGE
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Tiny numbers on credit-card receipts at gasoline pumps can mean big dollars for thieves who know how to steal identities.

Those numbers also have the capacity to cause catastrophic courtroom losses for retailers.

Albertson’s LLC is a case in point. The supermarket chain is being sued in federal court by East Baton Rouge Parish resident Lisa Bezet, who alleges the grocer’s gasoline pumps near the southwest corner of Airline Highway and Highland Road printed one too many of her credit card’s numbers on her receipt of June 13.

The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, or FACTA, limits to five the number of a card’s digits that can be printed on a receipt.

Bezet says that six of her credit card numbers were included on her June 13 gas pump receipt. She does not say that she has suffered financial loss, but notes in her suit that FACTA was designed to prevent losses due to identity theft.

“That’s why the statute was passed,” Scott Brady, one of Bezet’s attorneys, said Friday. “More than five digits, it creates the potential for fraud and identity theft.”

Albertson’s LLC is the parent of Albertsons stores, which do not include an apostrophe in their name.

“Albertsons makes every effort to safeguard the personal information of our customers and has technology in place to comply with all state and federal laws, including … the federal law that specifies what credit and debit card information can be printed on customers’ receipts,” company officials said Friday in a statement released through one of Albertson’s LLC’s Baton Rouge attorneys, Glenn Farnet.

“Albertsons believes this was an isolated incident,” the statement says. “We have verified that all of our fuel pump receipt printers throughout Louisiana are in full compliance with the state and federal requirements.”

Bezet seeks class-action status for her suit. If she wins, U.S. District Judge James Brady could order Albertsons to pay $100 to $1,000 for each receipt found to have included too many credit card numbers for thousands of customers.

In the view of Bart Murphy, a Chicago-area partner in the Indianapolis-based law firm of Ice Miller, such claims are no joke.

Murphy said Friday a national restaurant chain settled a similar suit last year after a plaintiff discovered 225,000 of the chain’s credit and debit card receipts included card expiration dates. Printing those dates is forbidden by federal law.

If the restaurant chain had lost at trial, Murphy said, it could have been forced to pay between $22.5 million and $225 million to patrons and their attorneys.