An employee of a Tokyo department store has been fired for divulging information on some 382,000 customers, the store operator said Wednesday.
Odakyu Department Store Co., which operates three outlets in Tokyo, also filed a criminal complaint with police the same day against the 38-year-old employee for alleged theft and breach of trust.
The employee sold the data, stored on floppy disks, to a private credit research company for around 1.6 million yen, according to Odakyu Department Store, a unit of Odakyu Electric Railway Co.
The employee has said he did it because he was in need of money, the department store operator said.
The company said it was tipped off in mid-June by a security company, which alerted it to a possible leak of customer information. A subsequent internal investigation pointed to the male employee, who has admitted taking data from the company, Odakyu Department Store said.