A number of Boots Advantage Card holders have been affected after a series of fraudulent attempts were made to access Boots.com accounts.
The health and beauty retailer confirmed the news to PA, where it said the suspension had come about after the IT security team spotted 'unusual' activity on several Boots Advantage Card accounts.
However, Boots wants to clarify that the issue affects less than 1% of the company's 14.4 million active Advantage Card users - around 150,000 people.
"Our customers' safety and security online is very important to us," said Boots.
"We can confirm we are writing to a small number of our customers to tell them that we have seen fraudulent attempts to access boots.com accounts.
"These attempts can be successful if people use the same email and password details on multiple accounts.
"We would like to reassure our customers that these details were not obtained from Boots. We are aware that other organisations may be impacted too."
Boots added: "As an extra precaution we have temporarily stopped payment by Boots Advantage Card points on boots.com or in store.
"This removes the ability for people to attempt to access any Boots accounts, but means that customers will not be able to use Boots Advantage Card points to pay for products in store and online for a short period of time.
"We are writing to customers if we believe that their account has been affected, and if their Boots Advantage Card points have been used fraudulently we will, of course, replace them.
"We currently believe that this will only affect a tiny percentage of cardholders and we would like to reassure customers that credit card information cannot be accessed. To help protect online accounts we strongly recommend using different passwords for each site used."
.jpg?w=600)
