European unit of MasterCard Inc.’ has formally informed  Belgian and German's Data Protection regulators about a data breach from the company's Priceless Specials loyalty program.

Customers data are available on the internet include, names, payment card numbers, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, gender, and dates of birth.

The card company alerted the watchdog about the breach on Aug. 19 and said the episode would have affected thousands of people, “a significant portion” of them would be from Germany.

After the discovery of data leak, Mastercard suspended Priceless Specials Germany and took down its website. The message posted on the website says:  "This issue has no connection to MasterCard's payment network."

"We have received a lot of questions and complaints since the announcement of this incident, we want to reassure users: we have contacted MasterCard in order to get additional information, and are following this case closely together with the Hessian data protection authority and all the other possible concerned authorities," says David Stevens, Chairman of the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

According to Heise Media reports Excel spreadsheets containing data of 90,000 and 84,000 rows that were distributed on the internet.

"On August 21, 2019, we became aware that the second file of personal information was published on the Internet. We are working to remove them as well."