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from Asahi Shimbun on Friday, March 07, 2003

Hundreds of passwords were obtained at Internet cafes.

Tokyo police arrested two men on suspicion of stealing 16 million yen through an online banking scheme that might involve hundreds of victims, officials said Thursday.

Ko Hakata, 35, a former think tank employee, and Goro Nakahashi, 27, a company employee, are accused of theft and illegally accessing information on the Internet, police said.

Police said the pair used Internet cafes and software that records keyboard strokes to break into the Net-banking system, which allows clients to conduct banking transactions, such as transferring funds, online.

Under the system, customers are required to enter identification numbers or passwords to access their accounts on the Web sites of banks.

The scheme started when the two secretly installed the ``key catcher" software onto computers at an Internet cafe in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward, the officials said.

They then visited the cafe to check for financial transactions made online and used the software to obtain the Citibank password of a 43-year-old owner of a family business in Tokyo, police said.

The two suspects used the password on Sept. 18 last year to access the bank's computer server. They transferred 16 million yen from the man's Citibank account to an account set up at a Japanese bank under a fictitious name, police said. After that, they withdrew the money.

Police indicated that this case could be the tip of the iceberg.

The suspects had installed the software in about 100 computers at 13 Internet cafes in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ueno since 2001, bringing them identification numbers or passwords of 719 people in Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture, police said.

Police have yet to determine how many of these ID numbers and passwords were for online banking.

The 719 ID numbers and passwords were seized from the homes of the two suspects.

The two also obtained personal profiles written by 195 people on Internet dating sites, police said.

Police plan to ask Internet cafe owners to strictly check the identities of customers. There are about 240 Net cafes in Tokyo.

The Net-banking system started in Japan in 1997. As of March last year, 7.5 million clients of 266 financial institutions throughout the country were using the system, according to the Center for Financial Industry Information Systems in Tokyo, a public organization under the supervision of the Financial Services Agency.

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