It's All Digital..... It's All Vulnerable

Alleged scam costs restaurant customers

The link above (Alleged scam costs restaurant customers) that sends you to an article published in Restaurant News shows just how crippling credit card payment scams can be to a business. Imagine that you started a restaurant, put in the hard work, built relationships in the community, gained a consistent level of sales, and became a fixture in your town. Then one day, about 25 years down the road, everything caught up to you. Now in this particular story, the question still remains..... Was it employee dishonesty, crime? Or was it hacking? With the majority of payments received at restaurants and bars being credit card, there is an unwritten trust agreement that is processed along with the transaction. The customer believes that you are charging them the exact amount for what they should be charged and that their card information is used solely for the purpose of paying that stated amount.
As a business owner, you might want to check your insurance policy to see if it mentions coverage for Crime or Employee Dishonesty to cover your business if your employees decide to attempt to steal or manipulate transactions. If someone did hack into your system and reveal credit card numbers and other important information of your customers then you will be in luck if you purchased Cyber Liability to protect you on that end. Cyber Liability is an ever growing coverage these days as you can imagine. With so much information being processed through our computers and then sent out over a "secure" line to communicate via the web, we can only hope that our information is in a safe place and used for what it's intended for.
As you can see, there is monetary loss and reputation at stake here. For this business owner it has been his reputation that has really taken a hit. The tables are no longer turning over like they used to because he has suffered the consequences of being in a small town, where reputation goes a long way. Unfortunately, you cannot insure reputation, so cover what you can to make a hit like this less severe on your business.