The Tokyo District Court handed a suspended three-year prison term Wednesday to a 62-year-old man who tried to extort money from Softbank Corp. by threatening to publish data on subscribers of the company's Internet connection service.
Teruaki Yuasa, a former company executive, obtained leaked client data of Internet connection service Yahoo BB, an affiliate of Softbank, and used them to threaten the Internet investor in January, saying, "Several million yen is necessary every month to prevent the leakage of the data, and 1 billion yen to 2 billion yen is necessary to introduce a security system."
In suspending the sentence for five years, presiding Judge Hideki Igeta said: "What the defendant did was mean and created public anxiety over information security. But he played a subsidiary role, based on instructions from another person," referring to Hiroshi Mori, 67, who is currently on trial for allegedly attempting to extort billions of yen from Softbank BB Corp.