Man arrested in Japan for stealing credit card info via web skimming

Tokyo: A 26-year-old man was arrested in western Japan on Wednesday on suspicion of stealing credit card information from a legitimate website, marking the country's first criminal probe into alleged web skimming, local media reported.

The suspect, identified as Sho Okuma, is believed to have embedded a malicious program into a legitimate music-related website and illegally obtained payment information between October and November last year from three customers in Kyoto Prefecture who accessed the site to purchase merchandise, Kyodo News reported.

Unlike phishing scams, in which potential victims are often redirected to counterfeit websites and prompted to input personal information, web skimming extracts data through legitimate websites and can be difficult to detect, the report said.

Okuma said he found a website that accepted credit card payments and stole the information by injecting malicious code into the website "out of curiosity," according to the police. (UNI)