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Japanese elementary school teacher under fire after selling students’ personal info online

Scott Wilson Jan 30, 2022
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“I want to know how much they offered him.”

Coming off the heels of last month, when a Tokyo middle school had students write down and turn in their social media passwords, recently there was another incident involving young students’ personal information getting leaked.

On January 29, the board of education in the town of Ichikawamisato, Yamanashi Prefecture announced that a male teacher in his 20s at a public elementary school gave away the personal information of 29 of the school’s 3rd and 4th grade students online. The information included students’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

▼ A video reporting on the incident.

According to the board of education, the teacher posted on Twitter on January 24 that he was “having money problems.” He then received a message from a “peer-to-peer lending” account that asked to purchase the personal information of students.

The teacher downloaded the student register from his computer, printed it, photographed it, then sent it as a message to the account. Three days later, the account posted the register publicly on Twitter, with all the information censored aside from the students’ seating numbers. The post also included the teacher’s name, a photo of his face, and the message, “The teacher who tried to sell personal information.”

While it hasn’t been yet confirmed if the leaked information has been used for anything nefarious, the teacher has admitted to not receiving any money in the exchange. He has been reported as saying, “I was having money problems, and I got suckered in by their offer. I’ve done something inexcusable to both the children and their parents and guardians.”

The teacher has been put under house arrest starting on January 31 as the board of education determines what to do from here.

Japanese netizens were uniformly shocked by what happened:

“Disgusting….”
“Talk about luck of the draw with who your teacher is.”
“I want to know how much they offered him.”
“If a teacher is hard up enough to do this, I can’t imagine what people with access to more sensitive info might do.”
“Yeah, that’s almost the worst thing here. That a teacher’s salary is so low that they’d stoop to doing this.”
“I think this kind of thing is just more and more likely to happen from here on.”
“Don’t ‘determine what to do’ with him. Fire him. Revoke his teaching license.”

There are still many mysteries here, such as who exactly was running the account that contacted him, and what their goal was in this whole situation. It doesn’t seem like it was anything perverted or dangerous for now, but we’ll see how the story unfolds from here.

Source: Mainichi Shimbun via My Game News Flash
Top image: Unsplash
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