Wawa Lawsuit Update: Encryption Software Helps Businesses Avoid Lawsuits Over Personal Information Leaks
Wawa lawsuit news is everywhere today. People are talking about how big the class-action lawsuit was against Wawa, because it’s the one of the nation’s biggest franchisees.
Wawa got hit with a huge wave of defective lawsuits, claiming that the company didn’t protect customers from a huge data breach that resulted in their credit being compromised.
The Wawa convenience store franchise is dealing with a huge wave of defective lawsuits right now over a data breach, which affected several of its stores along the East Coast of the United States.
This may turn out to be a major business disaster for Wawa, and their stock is really taking a dive as a result.
Wawa Lawsuit Update
A huge problem is that data breaches like these aren’t just cases of misplacing or losing mail-in coupons; they can result in much more serious things.
Customers who have had their card numbers stolen through data security breaches can sue, as can people who have been injured due to the breach.
The possibilities seem endless when you think about it, but most business owners don’t realize how serious the threat really is until it’s too late.
When a data security breach causes a large number of complaints and damages, the negligent party is likely to be ordered to pay back every penny to those who had their cards stolen.
Because of this possibility, businesses need to make sure their systems are protected from any such problems before they even arise.
According to the Wawa lawsuit update, the breach resulted in the processing of credit cards by the fraudulent owner of a Wawa store.
He used his access to the database to obtain credit card information, including the cardholder’s name, address, and date of birth. After he used the information, he opened up a new Wawa account using the information and began charging purchases to his own credit card.
Several customers who had purchased items from this convenience store while it was under a data security breach filed a lawsuit against the restaurant, saying that the owner was responsible for allowing his accounts to be compromised and for failing to alert them that there had been a problem.
Because of the class-action lawsuit, the restaurant lost money, and the federal government pursued criminal charges against the owner of the store.
The government was able to force him to pay back the funds he stole from the Wawa stores and to cover the costs of cleanup and other expenses associated with the case.
While this may not seem like a big deal on the surface, consider the consequences of allowing a data security breach to go unchecked.
You may not think of criminals when you think of convenience stores, but all it took was one disgruntled customer to bring a class-action lawsuit against a store that had failed to act on data security.
If these lawsuits had been brought against other retail chains, perhaps the impact would have been limited to a few locations along a state’s lines.
However, as the Wawa lawsuit became known, small business owners across the country began to realize that their data breaches could have far reaching consequences.
This realization prompted congress to enact the Data Security and Accountability Act (DSAA) in response to the Wawa lawsuit crisis.
Although this law has helped to bring some much needed clarity to store security practices, there are still a great many loopholes that continue to affect how stores handle their customers’ personal information.
In an effort to help businesses protect themselves from similar lawsuits, the DSAA encourages businesses to use encryption technology that secures all of a store’s information.
Encryption software is available to every business, and companies that do not currently use it can invest in it to protect their data from being compromised.
This is one step forward and two steps back, since there are still loopholes in the law which allow merchants to be held accountable when their data breaches are not fully investigated and addressed.
But by taking this first step, business owners have taken an important step toward making sure that they are not put in a situation where a lawsuit would be filed over data breaches that their business was legally liable for.
