Dai Nippon Printing Co. has ink all over itself.

While investigating the impact of an Internet shopping scam that led to the arrest of a subcontractor employee who stole data on 150,000 individuals and sold them to a group of crooks, the company discovered that from 2001-2004 more thefts took place on 8,637,405 individuals.

Whoa! That's a lot of stealing without nobody catching on.

Names, addresses, telephone numbers and, in some cases, credit card numbers and other sensitive data were stolen.

1,504,857 customers of American Home Assurance Co.

  581,293 customers of Aeon
 
  439,222 customers of NTT Finance Co.

The 43 companies also include Toyota Motor Corp., Kinki Nippon Tourist Co., KDDI Corp., DC Card Co., Nifty Corp., Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd. and UFJ Nicos Co.

The data has been recovered, but the lawyers are just now starting to rub their hands together.

How can 8 million of anything be stolen over the course of four years and nobody notice?