What happened？
Background: One day when I was doing google searching, a sudden celebration message of winning a lottery popped up from my phone screen. At that time, I didn’t wonder if that may be a scam message, I was so naïve to believe that I had won a prize of an iPhone in a lottery which I didn’t join either. To obtain the iPhone, I need to enable them to deduct 100 yen as an administrative usual fee from my credit card bank account. Since I did not feel weird that it was deceitful, I followed the phishing link and filled out my bank account information accordingly.
When I filled up the form and clicked submit, I suddenly had a clear mind that perhaps that is a scam. Since I had filled out all of my credit card information, I started to regret my stupid. I was worried that my account’s money would be all gone soon; therefore, I decided to take an emergency action to inform the Japan bank that there was a scam happening on my account and to request them to stop the related payment settlement and cancel the credit card for me.
However, the hotline calling service was already past 5pm although I forgot there is one 24 hour hotline that can be called for emergency purposes. Perhaps I was in a heavy panic, I couldn’t concentrate on other things, and in the end, I decided to go report to the police.
The Police Station that I went
The place where I live is not in a central district, however, it is also not far away from it. I live in north Tokyo where I can reach Tokyo station in 20 minutes by normal train and there is a police station next to the busy JR.
In fact, before I went to the police station, I already gave them a call, therefore, when I arrived at the police station, I saw there was a young police woman, about early 30s, sitting there and seemed waiting for me, perhaps..? I found she had noticed me, so we started a conversation quickly from there.
I fully reported to her regarding any ins and outs of the suspected scam and after that, I asked her what should I do. She took out a very old fashion contact phone book from the drawer and started to flip pages to find the scam report phone number for me. She picked up one that seemed to be the correct one and dialled the number. However, it was not correct. She tried another one but that one was also wrong. I started to worry because time passed very fast. I sat in the police station for an hour but we are still in the process of finding the Japan bank scam report phone number which is unbelievable!
The telephone auto-guide menu was sucks
If you have a chance to read another article of mine that talked about the telephone auto-guide menu in Japan, you will understand my feeling, why the policewoman and I, we both suck in the process of just finding a correct phone number for emergency help. Seriously, that was a time consuming process and made us very confused because she kept choosing some wrong buttons in the phone dialling system and that misled her to somewhere else.
From that time, I understood that actually Japanese people and foreigners both have the same bad feeling of using the telephone auto-guide menu, it can be told from her face obviously.
About the pop up user preference tracking message
She finally noticed that perhaps the phone list was long outdated, so she suggested using my smartphone to check out the scam report number. However, since my Japanese’s level was not that good at that time and I could not finish the searching task by myself, I requested her help and passed my smartphone over to her. She searched out the Japan bank’s official home page and we checked out the scam report number together.
In the homepage of Japan Bank, there was a pop up ‘user preference tracking’ message appeared on my phone screen, since it blocked one-fifth of the screen that we looked at the information page, we had to click ok to give it a pass in order to continue our reading. I taught her to click ‘ok to let go of it’, but she asked me what was that Japanese message about? I felt odd about her asking because it showed that she is obviously not a frequent internet user!
I spent 2 hours more in the police station than half of the time spent searching the scam report number which is inefficient. However, this is a good experience because I can share with you one group of the police’s working standards here in Japan. Besides, I am happy with my bank account’s safety now!
This article was first published on 15.1.21
Go other feature articles :
BONUS POINT SERIES 1 – Japan is a Kingdom of Bonus Point in the world? How do people find?
Japanese people has to learn ‘How to embrace solitude’?
How to avoid leaking of your personal data in the process of job hunting via job websites in Japan?
BAD EXPERIENCE 1 – Is the Customer Hotline Support Service Quality in Japan really that sucks?
A Japan Guide for First Arrivals #2021-1 – Where to open a bank account in 6 months after arrival?
A Japan Guide for First Arrivals #2021-3 – Where to rent a living place?
A Japan Guide for First Arrivals #2021-4 – Where to buy daily necessities?