Japanese users affected by US Credit Card Fiasco

The Japanese government has warned that the latest incident in the United States related to the theft of credit card holders’ data is affecting customers in Japan as well. Reports said that data related to almost 200,000 cardholders had been stolen from Arizona-based Cardsystems, which manages transactions for MasterCard.

Rumors also say that data related to almost 40 million credit cards is at risk with Visa and MasterCard users being the worse affected. American Express and Discovery cardholders are also vulnerable on a smaller scale. The latest news about the Japanese connection came when the users in Japan noticed fraudulent transactions.

Japan has as many as 26 credit firms dealing with MasterCard and all of them are reported to have been affected by the security scandal. One of the biggest banks in the nation, UFJ alone has claimed 20 instances of users getting fraud transactions on their credit card reports. This report has led to Hong Kong and other countries warning their citizen of regularly checking their statements for such transactions.

The chief executive of Cardsystems John Perry has accepted the blame for not putting in enough security measures as demanded by the credit card companies. They held on to private data of users for research purposes and that led to this largest incident of its kind in the history. MasterCard on their part have been ensuring their customers that they are taking every possible step to ensure that their finances are not compromised.