I’m a big fan of the American Airlines AAdvantage program, and I have both the company credit cards and my personal credit card with CitiBank in order to earn miles.

Recently, I received notice that both my business account and my personal accounts were being closed, and that Citi was going to reissue new cards to me. The reason is that “some vendor” that I do business with had a large number of credit card numbers stolen. I tried to press them to reveal the name of that vendor, but they wouldn’t because that vendor is preparing to announce it in the near future. Unlike a software exploit, telling people that their card was compromised immediately doesn’t seem to me to be a problem, but it could be a public relations nightmare that might be softened with a line like “we have proactively contacted all of the affected banks” etc. etc.

I’m going to make a prediction that Amazon.com, one of my favorite online vendors, is the culprit. This is the only vendor where I have used both my personal and business cards. Note that with the business, only my card was cancelled, no one else in the company needed new cards since I am the one who buys gear from Amazon.

So, anyone else having there cards torn up and reissued? If so, do you use Amazon? Any other guesses?

I hope I am wrong, but if it does turn out to be that the Internet’s largest retailer got hacked, do you think vendors will start to think seriously about security for a change?