IDG Contributor Network: Bloomingdale's gift card glitch illustrates lack of oversight

Bloomingdale's suffered a major glitch last week, with some customers receiving gift cards that were issued in amounts 200 times what they should have been. At least one customer received a $25,000 gift card. The situation illustrates two huge retail IT security issues. First, Bloomingdale's apparently has no human approval for gift cards, since it's hard to envision someone approving such amounts without question. But the second issue is that chains have almost no meaningful system for dealing with such glitches.

The problem began when a system confused the number of "Loyallist Points" issued and the dollar values. As Buzzfeed noted, in the Bloomingdale's system, 5,000 points is enough to get a $25 gift card. Some customers with 5,000 points were instead given $5,000 gift cards. Although this is a really bad mistake, all it takes is a small coding error to point to the "points" field instead of the "value" field. It's the exact kind of problem that a human supervisor would instantly spot — given the chance.

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