The Red Tape Raiders

Bob Sullivan, author of Gotcha Capitalism and Your Evil Twin covers Internet scams and consumer fraud for MSNBC.com. His blog, the Red Tape Chronicles "unmasks corporate sneakiness, government waste, technology run amok and outright scams."

Recently, Sullivan reported on the giant security breach that took place at Heartland Payment Systems. A lawsuit was filed on Tuesday.

Heartland has not released an estimate of the number of accounts impacted by the attack, but Litan said it might be the biggest data leak ever: The firm handles 100 million transactions every month for 250,000 clients. Heartland has said it was alerted by Visa and MasterCard to a pattern of fraud on its networks last fall, but only discovered the security hole in its network last week . That gave hackers access to potentially hundreds of millions of transactions over several months.

The largest known data leak to date involved retailer TJ Maxx, which lost the data on 45 million credit cards in 2007. But this time, there are signs the haul, and the targets, might be astonishingly large.

In addition, Red Tape Chronicles offers a way to expose consumer fraud, Internet scams and intentionally confusing or too much red tape, by joining the Redtape Raiders. In order to post an article to the Red Tape Raiders, you'll have to join Newsvine and then the Raiders group. Click here for a few of the ground rules and further instructions if you are interested.