Alert for Hotels.com customers

You may want to flag your credit report for potential fraud. They lost a laptop containing credit card information.

Thousands of Hotels.com customers may be at risk for credit card fraud after a laptop computer containing their personal information was stolen from an auditor, a company spokesman said Saturday.

Both Hotels.com and Ernst & Young mailed letters to Hotels.com customers this past week encouraging them to take appropriate action to protect their personal information.

The transactions recorded on the laptop were mostly from 2004, although some were from 2003 or 2002, the companies said. The computer contained personal information including names, addresses and credit card information of about 243,000 Hotels.com customers. It did not include their Social Security numbers.