Apprentice winner had to cancel her card 6,000 miles from home
MICHELLE Dewberry only discovered her card details had been stolen when she read about BA’s data breach on the news.
The former winner of BBC’s The Apprentice is on a backpacking trip around south-east Asia and has just landed in Hoi An in Vietnam.
Travelling alone and in an unfamiliar city more than 6,000 miles away from her home in Hull, the businesswoman and broadcaster said the experience had been particularly stressful.
Despite this, she says she has received precious little help – or sympathy – from BA.
Like many thousands of others, the 38-yearold received an email from the airline alerting her about the hack and urging her to contact
her bank. Anxious for guidance, she phoned BA and asked if a manager could call her back. She was told this was not possible.
Miss Dewberry called her bank and, when she finally managed to get through, she was urged to trawl through all her recent transactions to check for suspicious payments.
Worried she could be targeted by fraud, Miss Dewberry decided to cancel her main card and is now relying on a back-up card.
She said: ‘It is frustrating that BA has shown such little regard for me as a customer. I should be having a great time enjoying myself – instead I’m spending lots of time and money on calls trying to cancel my card and shift my money around. The fact that BA isn’t even prepared to have a conversation with me about this is outrageous. I realise things can go wrong. But it is how a company reacts that separates the good from the bad. BA has ignored its customers. The whole experience has made me furious.’