Six Flags Great Adventure. Photo: PitK/Shutterstock.com

Amusement park operator Six Flags Entertainment faces a potential class action claiming it failed to comply with a 2003 federal law requiring truncation of credit card numbers on cash register receipts.

Six Flags–which is headquartered in Grand Prairie, Texas–was accused in the suit of committing thousands of violations of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act's requirement that cash register receipts print no more than five digits of a customer's credit card number. The sole named plaintiff in the case, Yaakov Katz, says he was issued a receipt at the company's Six Flags Great Adventure park in New Jersey with 10 digits of his American Express card number. FACTA provides statutory damages of up to $1,000 per violation, and the suit seeks attorney fees, costs and punitive damages.

Six Flags had ample warning of the act's requirement to truncate credit card numbers, as well as its requirement not to show card expiration numbers on receipts, which went into effect in 2006, according to the suit by Ryan Gentile of Gus Farinella's office in Floral Park, New York. The complaint cites announcements and notices about the truncation requirement from the Federal Trade Commission, credit card processors, cash register manufacturers, and the companies that issue Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards.

“Despite defendants' long-standing actual knowledge of FACTA's requirements, defendants operated for a substantial period of time, possibly since FACTA first went into effect, in reckless, i.e. willful, disregard of FACTA's requirements and continue to use cash registers or other point of sale machines or devices that printed receipts in violation the truncation requirement after 2006,” the suit claims.

The suit names Six Flags Entertainment and Six Flags Great Adventure as defendants. It was brought on behalf of a nationwide class of persons who used a debit or credit card at any Six Flags location and were given an electronically printed receipt showing more than the last five digits of their card number after Nov. 5, 2012. Six Flags has 17 amusement park and water park locations in the United States.

The suit was filed in state Superior Court in Ocean County on Nov. 30 and removed to federal court on Jan. 4. Plaintiffs lawyer Gentile declined to comment on the case. Andrea D'Ambra of Norton Rose Fulbright in New York, who filed the removal notice for Six Flags, also declined to comment on the case, as did Six Flags spokeswoman Sandra Daniels.

A similar suit in the District of New Jersey, Kamal v. J. Crew Group, was dismissed in October 2016 based on a finding that the lack of actual damages fails to satisfy the requirement of a “concrete” injury under the U.S. Supreme Court case Spokeo v . Robins.

In Kamal, U.S. District Judge William Martini of the District of New Jersey dismissed a class suit against retailer J.Crew upon finding that without evidence of fraudulent credit card use, a customer whose account number is printed on a store receipt has not suffered sufficient harm to confer Article III standing,

A similar suit against Donna Karan International in the Southern District of New York was dismissed for the same reason in May 2017.

But in 2012 another amusement park company, Palace Entertainment, gave class members free amusement park tickets to settle a suit in the Western District of Pennsylvania over violations of PASPA. And in another Western District of Pennsylvania case over failure to redact parts of credit card numbers, Pittsburgh sandwich shop Primanti gave thousands of customers a free sandwich each to settle its case.