ID theft suspected in Yahoo Japan’s fraudulent auctions

One thing to consider if you’re a user of Yahoo Japan’s auction site: Yahoo Japan Auction has been hit with several thousand cases of identity theft and fraudulent auctions involving using the accounts. As of now, the combined confirmed and suspected ID theft in Yahoo Japan Auctions has reached about 10,000, with an increasing number of auction users in legal dispute with Yahoo Japan who claim they were charged auction fees for transactions that they don’t know about.

Most of the auctions involving the accounts were posted from Korea, China and other Asian countries.

Yahoo Japan, for its part, denies any responsibility on the matter:

“An internal investigation we carried out hasn’t found any information leakage. It can’t be ruled out that the users themselves have had their IDs stolen as a result of [them entering their personal data via e-mail] phishing fraud schemes.”

However, given the number of cases of alleged identity theft, it seems probable that there is some way intruders manage steal users’ personal data through the system itself.

Yahoo Japan launched its auction service in 1999 ahead of eBay and has a big lead in internet auction business in Japan. Around 7 million users have registered on the site by the end of June this year and the value of auction transactions on the site has reached 740 billion yen on 2007.