Loyalty programs used to be simple: earn points, get perks, repeat. But in today’s data-driven restaurant world, they’ve become one of the richest—and riskiest—targets for attackers. Modern loyalty platforms collect far more than a point balance. They store personal information, behavioral data, visit frequency, purchase history, and often real-time location tied to mobile apps. What was once a marketing tool has quietly become a dense cluster of data that cybercriminals actively seek out.
And the cyberattacks are escalating. Loyalty accounts offer high value with low friction: easy logins, lighter monitoring than payment systems, and APIs connecting apps, web, kiosks, and POS. It’s the perfect environment for credential stuffing, account takeover, and program fraud that blends in with normal guest activity.
Restaurants count on loyalty programs to strengthen relationships. Hackers count on them to steal.
Most guests don’t realize how much personal information a modern loyalty program collects when they sign up. And on the operator side, loyalty technology has evolved so quickly—and become so deeply integrated across apps, ordering channels, and marketing platforms—that many restaurants don’t fully see how large and sensitive the data footprint has become. A modern loyalty account often includes personal contact information, demographic details, purchase frequency, item-level preferences, digital behavior across app and web, time-of-day usage patterns, visit-location history, and even stored payment tokens or linked wallets. It’s a depth of data that fuels personalization and marketing, but also dramatically raises the stakes when security controls fall short.
For cybercriminals, that dataset is gold. More than 50 million U.S. accounts were exposed across service-industry platforms in a single year, and loyalty systems were among the most frequently targeted.¹ According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the global average breach now costs $4.44 million, with U.S. breaches reaching $10.22 million, numbers that climb even higher when attackers gain access to personal identity and loyalty data.²
When it comes to loyalty programs, attackers rarely break in through technical exploits. They log in through the front door.3
Here are five meal tickets hackers love most:
Password reuse across consumer apps, weak authentication, and inconsistent identity controls make loyalty systems prime for credential-stuffing and account takeover campaigns. Without multi-factor authentication (MFA) or adaptive authentication in place, attackers can test thousands of credential pairs in minutes.
Restaurants need to treat loyalty access the same way they treat payment access: tightly governed, fully monitored, and designed to stop automated attacks before they start.
Loyalty point balances function like digital currency, and bots are increasingly used for automated point abuse and loyalty point harvesting at scale. Automated scripts test credentials, redeem points, and resell rewards long before staff notice a spike in activity. This automation has outpaced manual review. Even attentive teams can’t catch the volume or speed of coordinated attacks without behavioral analytics and real-time monitoring. As loyalty programs expand across apps, kiosks, and online ordering, attackers simply follow the lowest-friction path.
Loyalty platforms are built on integrations. Points sync with online ordering, rewards redeem through kiosks, CRM systems track preferences, gift-card platforms share data, and mobile apps rely on APIs for every interaction. When APIs aren’t secured or monitored, they become one of the easiest places for attackers to exploit:
Automated brute-force attempts
Unauthorized point transfers
Data scraping
Injection attacks
Gift-card fraud
Malicious app impersonation
Stronger API governance and behavioral monitoring are no longer optional—they’re foundational to loyalty security.
Loyalty data may fall outside PCI scope, but it often contains:
Contact details
Purchase history
Behavioral insights
Saved addresses
Stored payment tokens
Household and family data
This is everything an attacker needs to build convincing phishing campaigns, commit fraud across channels, or resell identity data. Because loyalty data travels between apps, analytics tools, CRM systems, and marketing platforms, poor data hygiene or weak access controls can expose sensitive information long before anyone notices.
Unlike payment fraud, loyalty fraud is designed to mimic normal customer activity. Small point redemptions. Frequent account logins. New devices. Gift-card generation. Changes to email or phone number. Without real-time behavioral analytics, restaurants often catch loyalty breaches only after guests complain—by then, the points are gone. Automated monitoring is now table stakes. Loyalty fraud moves too quickly for manual review.
Loyalty fraud doesn’t behave like payment fraud—it blends in.
That’s why restaurants now need the same behind-the-scenes vigilance once reserved for airlines and major retailers: strong identity controls, tighter oversight, and smarter detection working together.
Loyalty security needs the rigor of a financial system, the monitoring of an e-commerce platform, and the resilience of a modern restaurant tech stack. ESP, a NexusTek company, delivers exactly that—protecting loyalty environments end-to-end, from identity to APIs to guest data.
With ESP behind the scenes, restaurants get:
Stronger identity protections – MFA enforcement, password-hardening policies, threat-aware authentication, and safer logins across mobile, web, and in-store systems.
AI-driven fraud detection – Machine-learning models that identify unusual patterns, bot activity, and high-risk behavior before it impacts guests.
Hybrid and private-cloud infrastructure – Secure hosting for POS with built-in redundancy and high availability.
Behavioral monitoring and anomaly detection – Real-time alerts for suspicious logins, rapid point transfers, high-risk redemptions, or unusual device behavior.
API security and governance – Visibility, traffic filtering, and rate-limiting to stop automated abuse, unauthorized access, and fraud attempts across integrated systems.
End-to-end data protection – Secure handling of customer identity, stronger privacy controls, and tighter access rules for staff and vendors.
Continuous support and incident response – Dedicated teams monitoring loyalty platforms and connected systems 24/7, ensuring attackers can’t slip through unnoticed.
Instead of reacting to stolen points, frustrated guests, or surprise breaches, restaurants get proactive protection that preserves trust—and keeps loyalty programs generating value, not risk.
Guests join loyalty programs because they expect value—not risk. If their information is stolen or their points vanish, trust erodes instantly. But when loyalty systems are secure, monitored, and governed, they become one of a restaurant’s most powerful engines for growth.
ESP keeps loyalty programs safe from credential stuffing, loyalty point fraud, bots, identity attacks, and API abuse—so restaurants can deliver the rewards guests love without exposing their data.
When you're ready to fortify the loyalty experience, ESP is ready to help
Cybernews, The hidden cost of rewards: how reward programs turn loyalty into dollars, December 2024
IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, July 2025
Novus Loyalty, How Hackers Exploit Loyalty Programs—Can PCI DSS Offer Protection?, February 2025
Founder, ESP, a NexusTek company
Jason Pullo is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with a passion for transforming the hospitality industry through innovative IT solutions. As Founder and CEO of Enterprise Solutions Providers, he leads the company’s vision and growth, helping hotels navigate everything from new builds and brand transitions to large-scale renovations. Since launching the firm in 2003, Jason has played a key role in the technology strategy behind more than 1,000 hotel acquisitions. His journey began at just 18 years old as an IT manager for a trade show company, and he’s since led major projects like a multimillion-dollar hotel renovation in New York City, delivering guest-centric technology with measurable business impact.