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The story
Sandwichman’s Takeshi Tomisawa (52) spoke on the October 10 broadcast of Nippon Broadcasting’s “Sandwichman the Radio Show Saturday” about receiving a notification email alerting him to unauthorized use of his credit card. He said he was stunned by the notice of an overseas purchase he didn’t recognize, and revealed he was unsatisfied with how the call center handled his follow-up inquiry. Reactions on 5ch split between those questioning the card company’s response and those who felt Tomisawa’s own explanation was too vague for the rep to have handled easily. The realities of call center work, and the term “ope-hara” (operator harassment) — the flip side of “kasu-hara” (customer harassment, i.e. unreasonable demands from customers) — also became a talking point.
10/10 (Sat) 15:48
Sandwichman’s Takeshi Tomisawa (52) appeared on October 10 on Nippon Broadcasting’s “Sandwichman the Radio Show Saturday” (Saturdays, 1pm), which he hosts, and revealed that he had been the victim of credit card fraud.
Bringing up the recent string of corporate data breaches leaking personal information, Tomisawa said: “Last night I was playing a game when an email came in telling me my card had been used — from the card company. It said, ‘This was just used for an overseas purchase.’” He received the email despite not recognizing the charge. “No way, I’m right here, at home. Apparently even if you buy something in Japan, sometimes it shows up as an ‘overseas purchase’ if the payment processing runs through a foreign company. But I looked at the amount and thought, I don’t remember buying anything like this.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
The one who looks like Date is actually Tomisawa
It's "ope-hara" (operator harassment). It's funny because bringing up that word shuts people up instantly. Just say "I'm a victim of ope-hara — wasting my time and causing me damage!" and you're golden
That's not really a job for full-time employees, is it
Lol, I called a PC maker's call center once and got a foreign rep. Guess that's unavoidable since it's a foreign-made PC though lol
I got an email from Sumitomo Mitsui basically asking "want us to suspend the card and reissue it?"
Turns out some Brazilian airline had charged me about 40,000 yen without permission
In a case like that, can you ever find out where the card info leaked from?
And is there any kind of compensation?
Normally if something like that happens they freeze it immediately and go through your recent history with you together
Getting an email means you're using online banking, so
you could just freeze it yourself from the website.
Why call? …Hmm
Normally that's how it'd go, but there are weird ones out there who are either incompetent or deliberately phoning it in
Right?
Maybe he called the number written in that email
Is it that he just forgot, or something else?
Who knows.
A lot of the time you can't tell just from looking at the billing name either
Customers aren't gods,
and call center staff aren't gods or psychics either
Way too many idiots out there think everything should just be intuited for them
Normally at that point they'd consider that it might be fraud and go:
"We'll look into this charge for you. If it turns out to be unauthorized, we'll need to suspend your card — is that all right?"
That's how I'd expect it to go
So he should've just said that, right?
Whether it might have been used fraudulently
There are plenty of charges people just forget about,
plenty of charges you can't identify just by looking at the merchant name,
and plenty that come from overseas too
There are so many possible scenarios in a case like this, so first they interview you to narrow it down
Then once they've grasped the situation, they decide how to respond
If Re: #1's call really was to a credit card company's call center, the operator probably had a flowchart in their head
If the answer to this question is yes, go this route; if no, go that route — that's how they narrow it down
now I'm getting fired up
No doubt about it
That's Dell, lol
Oh, Dell does that too huh
Mine was ASUS, but I got told
"Zere, pressu zee powah buttan, eet shoddu respond" (in broken Japanese)
and I just burst out laughing
Even if your card has 3D Secure, some merchants just don't support it lol
The good ones briskly deflect your complaints and sarcasm
so smoothly you end up with nothing left to complain about
They're great with pacing and timing too
The bad ones just go "uh-huh, uh-huh" on the other end of the line
with that "yeah whatever, got it" kind of attitude and timing
That's exactly what they're paid to do
Background and key points of this topic
Credit card fraud has been rising year after year, and card companies have systems in place to automatically suspend a card temporarily when suspicious usage is detected, then contact the holder to verify their identity. What split opinion in the thread was whether Tomisawa’s own explanation was too vague — causing the response to lag — versus the view that the operator should have proactively presented the suspicious usage pattern for confirmation first. Many posts touched on the realities of call center work — “is it full-time staff or part-timers,” “isn’t this just flowchart-based triage” — with posters who had hands-on experience in the field offering both defenses and explanations. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that “ope-hara” (operator harassment), used as the flip side of “kasu-hara,” is a coined term for unreasonable demands or venting directed at operators by customers, and it has not yet become a widely established term. One thing readers could easily get wrong: Tomisawa’s comments are strictly his own account from the radio show, and he himself never disclosed the card company’s name or any details about the operator.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Geisupo Sokuhou+) thread “Takeshi Tomisawa hit by credit card fraud → fumes at call center’s response: “What’s with that attitude!”“
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