The massive security breach last week at a credit card data processing center in the United States is prompting credit card companies in Japan to step up measures to prevent card-related fraud.
According to industry officials, the data theft has caused about 110 million yen in damages so far in Japan and reinforced the argument that there needs to be better measures in place to prevent fraud.
"One thing that we can do to prevent such fraud is to boost the precision of our monitoring system so we can catch any irregular transactions," said Mitsuhiro Oshima, a spokesman for American Express International, Inc.'s Japan office.