Photo/Illutration Akiko Murobayashi, right, president of NTT Marketing Act ProCX, apologizes for a leak of personal information at a news conference in Osaka on Oct. 17. (Tomohiko Kaneko)

OSAKA—Police are investigating a 10-year leak of personal information of about 9 million people used by a call center subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corp. (NTT West).

Although no damage has been reported so far, some of the affected clients of the subsidiary have not been identified, according to company officials.

“The leak has a significant impact on our clients and society at large,” Akiko Murobayashi, president of the call center subsidiary, NTT Marketing Act ProCX, told a news conference in Osaka on Oct. 17. “We apologize for allowing such an incident to occur. We will do our utmost to regain trust.”

A temporary worker who was formerly dispatched to NTT Business Solutions Corp., another NTT West subsidiary, illegally obtained the information over about 10 years from around July 2013 to January this year, senior officials of the two subsidiaries said.

The worker told a company investigation that the information, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers, was transferred to list brokers. Eighty-one cases involved credit card information, the companies said.

NTT Marketing Act ProCX received the data from 59 clients, such as companies and local governments. The information was kept in a computer server at NTT Business Solutions.

The temporary worker, who was in charge of operating and maintaining the call center system, is believed to have taken the information out of the company on a USB memory device.

The two subsidiaries conducted an in-house investigation in April 2022 at the request of a client who suspected a data leak. The investigation failed to confirm any lost or missing information.

They discovered the data leak during a re-investigation in July following a police probe.

NTT Business Solutions officials acknowledged defects in data management.

IDs for accessing computer servers were shared by employees, and information could be downloaded onto memory devices brought from outside the company.

Employees were able to access computer servers from home and elsewhere.

The two companies said the number of affected clients could grow because they have not yet identified companies that provided 1 million pieces of the leaked personal information.

A number of local governments said the information they provided could have been leaked.

The leak apparently included information of up to 140,000 residents of Fukuoka Prefecture concerning the automobile tax, information of about 15,000 residents of Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, about the specific health checkups, and information of up to 7,000 residents of Tokyo’s Adachi Ward about the same checkups.

The city of Kawachi-Nagano in Osaka Prefecture said up to 4,400 cases of information on people who fell behind on municipal tax payments could have been leaked.

NTT Docomo Inc. said about 72,000 cases of personal information used for telemarketing were leaked.

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