A number of credit card providers, including high-street bank Abbey, have had to issue a credit-card recall after Visa warned that details of associated accounts may have been compromised.

The security scare came to light when the card merchant notified the card providers whose customers were affected.

The subsequent credit-card recall came to light today, after an Abbey customer contacted the press to complain that it had taken nearly a month for notification of the threat to reach him.

An Abbey spokeswoman said: 'We were given the alert from Visa last Friday and started to send letters to our customers on the same day.'

The bank also confirmed its alert related to a security breach that took place between 20 and 22 October.

'Card providers receive alerts when Visa International think an internet merchant's site has been compromised and there is potential that cardholders could be affected,' she added.

Visa International was not at liberty to confirm that a compromised merchant's site was the cause of this particular alert.

But a Visa spokesman did say that the month it took to notify card providers of the breach was 'not unsurprising'.

He added: 'Once we're alerted to a compromise by a merchant's acquiring bank we issue relevant data to the affected card providers and it is up to them what action they next take.

'They can close accounts and re-issue the cards or choose to monitor the accounts more closely. This incident relates to a tiny proportion of UK cards, given that there are 80m in the UK alone.'

The Abbey spokeswoman added: 'This is a normal business activity and there is nothing out of the ordinary with this recent alert.'

Abbey has recently faced criticism following another security scare involving Cahoot, its internet bank. This latest scare also comes only six days after new owners, Santander Central Hispano, sacked Abbey's IT director.