If you used Riverland Woods' online payment system at any point before mid July, 2014, your credit card information may have been compromised. You...
If you used Riverland Woods' online payment system at any point before mid July, 2014, your credit card information may have been compromised. You should immediately report this to your card issuer and have them send you a replacement. And, by the way, I believe they're required to pay for at least 12 months of credit protection service when they commit an error this huge.
They were running the online payment site with NO encryption. For those who are not informoation-security savvy, this is the equivalent of shouting your credit card information across a crowded room and hoping that nobody writes it down.
I reported this to the office manager when they first began accepting online payments. I told them that they're taking credit card info with no encryption, ie: zero security. The manager insisted that this was not true, despite me emailing screenshots showing that the page was not encrypted. I gave them an easy way to check it themselves - If the little padlock icon does not appear (in Chrome, it's on the left side of the address bar), your info is not encrypted. They brushed this off. So, I refrained from using their online payment system at this point.
In July, I was not in town to pay in person, so I had to use their online system. I alerted the manager once more that the system was still unencrypted. The response? They LAUGHED at me.
At this point, I went over the manager's head and called the company who owns the property. They thanked me for alerting them. One hour later, they called back and left a voicemail to say that they had their "web guy" fix the issue, and it should now be safe to use. They then thanked me again for coming directly to them to report this, since the manager on site obviously didn't care that their tenents' identity info was being so carelessly compromised.
The very next day, the manager of the property tried to show their wrath at my going over their head... by posting a threat of eviction on my door. I took it into the office, put it on their desk, and advised them to tear it up, unless they wanted to get in legal trouble. I never heard from them again on this issue.