According to reports, Irish based gaming operator giant Paddy Power was hacked in 2010 and more than 649,000 customers had their personal information stolen. Online casino players and bettors at Paddy Power were informed of the breach on July 31, 2014.
Reports say that the stolen information included names and surnames of customers, their date of birth, personal addresses and details of the Q & A prompts that are often used to verify the details of a personal account. However, Paddy Power claims that no personal financial or banking details had been stolen.
The managing director of the online division at Paddy Power, Peter O’Donovan, apologized to the customers that have been affected as a result of the breach. “We sincerely regret that this happened. We are very serious about taking responsibility of the customer data and there was an extensive investigation into the breach and the data that we managed to recover. The investigation revealed no evidence that any of the player accounts have been impacted by the incident,” he said.
The gaming operator was told in March 2014 that some of the Paddy Power data had been in a possession of an unknown individual and the company alerted the Irish police An Garda Síochána. The assets of the unknown Canadian individual have been seized through a court order and with the help of the Ontario police.
In March, the company announced that it had 1.9 million active online casino players and bettors which is a 19 percent increase on the previous year. Just like all online gaming operators, it is enjoying an online boom. Last year, Paddy Power won £375m from online gamblers, a raise of 21%.