British Airways has admitted that data belonging to another 185,000 passengers may have been stolen.

Customers who used a payment card to make reward bookings between 21 April and 28 July this year may be at risk.

The airline said that in September 380,000 payments were targeted, with thousands of customers being asked to contact their banks. Thankfully, the figure has since been reduced to 244,000, which is 64% of payments have been affected.

Investigations by the National Crime Agency (NCA) show that another 77,000 customers could have had their personal names, addresses, email addresses, card numbers, expiry dates and card verification value (CVV) numbers stolen. And another 108,000 may have been affected without their CVV being stolen.

BA owner IAG in a statement said: “While British Airways does not have conclusive evidence that the data was removed from its systems, it is taking a prudent approach in notifying potentially affected customers, advising them to contact their bank or card provider as a precaution.

“Since the announcement on September 6, 2018, British Airways can confirm that it has had no verified cases of fraud.”

The airline added, “We are very sorry that this criminal activity has occurred. As we have been doing, we will reimburse any customers who have suffered financial losses as a direct result of the data theft and we will be offering credit rating monitoring, provided by specialists in the field, to any affected customer who is concerned about an impact to their credit rating.” 

Passengers hit by the data breach earlier in the year were forced to cancel their credit cards.

The airline could be fined millions of shillings due to the data breach.

The announcement comes after Cathay Airline also revealed that it suffered a major data breach. 

By Airport Pickups London