We see a lot of lip service paid to the importance of complying with payment card industry standards when merchants accept credit and debit cards. But it seems plenty of websites still can't be bothered to follow the rules, which are designed to protect their customers against fraud and identity theft.

Just last week, Reg reader Martti Ylioja spotted Belgium-based Tele Ticket Service retaining most of his credit-card details, including the "CCV2" verification code that is coveted by criminal carders.

"When you log into the site the next time its still all in there - a bit dangerous practice," he wrote. He included the screenshot below to show us what he saw several days after surrendering his credit card info to the site.

Such practice is a violation of section 3.2.2 of the PCI rules, said Tom Arnold, a member of PSC, which provides consulting for companies that accept electronic payments. "To store [the CCVC2] and remember it and keep it on file is a big-time violation," he said.

The PCI standards are designed to prevent the kind of credit card heists that befell TJX after it improperly stored huge amounts of credit card data. Merchants found flouting the rules can be forced to pay penalties in some cases. We emailed representatives at Tele Ticket Service but never got a response.

Ylioja was understandably concerned about his data being stored and was unable to figure out how to remove the data from the site other then overwriting it with bogus information. And even that wasn't easy.

"Interestingly, I had to generate a fictitious Visa card number with a correct check sum to get it replaced," he said. ®

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