Data belonging to about 130,000 accounts of users of the Line Pay application, both in Japan and abroad, was leaked on the internet. It contains payment data for two months until the end of November.
Line Pay claimed the data was accidentally uploaded by its group company and could be viewed between September 12 and November 24. There was a payout amount, date and time during the promotional campaign which was held from December 2020 to April 2021. Fortunately the leaked information did not include any session data such as usernames, addresses or credit card numbers.
It's just that, although so far no losses from data leaks have been reported, it is possible to identify users through special analysis.
Line Pay said it confirmed 11 instances where information was accessed externally and warned users that they could receive suspicious messages from potential fraudsters.
"We deeply apologize for causing great trouble and concern," the company said in a statement quoted by Japan Today.
To note, Line Pay allows users to send money to each other, make online purchases, or pay in stores and restaurants.
Data as of June, Line Pay has around 40 million users in Japan. In late November, it was reported that Line Pay had been unusable by the public in Japan for about an hour.
And at that time, there were about 25,000 repeated transactions. In response to this, Line Pay confirmed that the data leak had nothing to do with the incident.