Thousands of credit card holders have been told to hand back their cards after fraudsters in Spain illegally obtained information about their accounts.

The massive credit card recall involves more than 100,000 credit cards in Germany. Customers of Germany's cooperative banks have been hardest hit with more than 60,000 affected. A spokesman for the association of cooperative banks BVR said the fraud involved Visa and Mastercard credit card holders who recently traveled to Spain.

But other banks and savings institutions in Germany are also affected.

"It's a massive replacement program. A number of credit card distributors have been affected including some from other countries. We are not sure how many cardholders were in Spain at the time in question," Andreas Martin of the German Central Credit Card Commission (ZKA), told Deutsche Welle.

Security breach

Last month around 15,000 bank customers from KarstadtQuelle-Bank had to have their cards replaced. At the beginning of November, Barclaycard and Lufthansa (Miles & More) followed suit.

High street bank Deutsche Bank has also confirmed that considerably more cards have been replaced recently. Commerzbank announced that it too had issued new credit cards and new numbers as a "precautionary measure".

Mastercard and Visa warned the banks about possible problems after irregularities were discovered at a Spanish payment processor, according to the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper. Police have launched a criminal investigation. No further details about how the fraudsters got hold of the customers' account information have been released.

Banks say that all affected customers will be notified by their banks in the coming days.

nrt/dpa/AP

Editor: Michael Lawton