A Neiman Marcus cardholder based in Illinois has filed legal action against Neiman Marcus Group Ltd over the retailer's data breach, Bloomberg said. Neiman earlier has announced that its system has been breached and that over a a million customer credit cards could have been compromised.
In a Chicago federal court, Cook County, Illinois-based Hilary Remijas is suing Neiman on breaching state consumer-fraud laws on behalf of anyone who has made their purchases at Neiman Marcus from July 16 to October 30, 2013 using their debit or credit cards. Remijas is seeking monetary damages and a court order that would force the company to shoulder the cost of customer credit monitoring for a minimum of three years.
In the filing, Remijas said, "Neiman Marcus has placed the burden on aggrieved customers like plaintiff and the other members of the class, either to monitor their accounts and credit reports for years to come, or to spend time and money on fraud alerts or credit-report security freezes."
Neiman's data breach had several US lawmakers call for a national notification requirement aside from a litigation, Bloomberg said. Last month, executives of Neiman and Target Corp, which were also hacked as well, made their appearance at a Senate hearing to answer questions about the data breaches.
In January, Neiman said that data of a maximum of 1.1 million credit cards might have been compromised by software surreptitiously installed on the Remijas' mentioned dates in her lawsuit. Last month, the retailer corrected the figure initially given and said that only 350,000 cards were potentially affected. In a statement by Neiman Marcus president Karen Katz published on the retailer's website, credit-card issuers MasterCard Inc, Visa Inc and Discover Financial confirmed that around 9,200 cards were fraudulently used elsewhere.
Bloomberg noted that a similar suit was filed in an Atlanta federal court in January, but was subsequently dropped yesterday when Neiman challenged the eligibility of the plaintiff to pursue legal action against the company.
