What do you do when your Rakuten account gets blocked?

Rakuten is one of the biggest commerce marketplaces in Japan, alongside Amazon. I primarily use it for furusato nouzei purchases (more on that here).

Last week i decided to buy a few things. 1 day later, Rakuten cancelled my orders and blocked my account.

From a systems perspective, i totally get it. Rakuten sees a user that hadn't logged in for months suddenly spend JPY60,000, on multiple transactions at the same time. Any fraud review system would probably flag this as suspicious.

But i'm not here to empathise with big corp's challenges, i'm here to be upset as a consumer.

The woes of navigating account suspensions

So here's what i think - the archetype for the person designing customer service workflows for fraud prevention in Japanese companies is a Japanese person, who maybe joined the company straight out of university and has worked there for 15 years, rotating to 5 different departments during that time, and has a tenuous grasp of the non-Japanese speaking world because following the rules is an ingrained part of their identity.

I mention this archetype because it implies several things to me.

1. The person in charge of getting this workflow in front of customers does not have subject matter expertise in designing said workflows
2. This person understands the company, but likely doesn't understand user behaviour

And i derived this archetype because of the experience i went through.

Why is this process problematic?

1. They told me about this by text only

I received a text message (as in, SMS), entirely in Japanese, mentioning one of my order numbers, saying they cancelled my order and disabled my account for security purposes. This came the day after i placed my order.

The first thing i thought was, "wow this wall of text is hard to read." Then once i got over being annoyed at my own poor level of Japanese proficiency, i thought, "is this a scam?"

The message came from a generic number with no links to to any Rakuten help pages.

I checked my email, because surely if my account was compromised and my orders cancelled i'd have received an email? Of course, the answer is no, i didn't receive any emails.

2. There's no mention of account disablement anywhere

With a dubious text and no emails, I now have to independently verify the validity of this information. I try to login to my account, and i get an error. Username or password is wrong.

There is no mention at all that my account was disabled.

So is my account suspended, or is my password wrong? Only one way to find out. I try to reset my password.

On the password reset screen it asks me to enter my email. I do so and it tells me that there's no such email registered to an account.

Again, there's no mention that the account was disabled.

I didn't try re-registering a brand new account with my email, but now i wonder what would have happened if i did.

But my gripe here is, if the platform itself - the most reliable source of information - doesn't tell me the account is disabled, how else can i independently determine if its true or not?

3. The help form is hard to discover

After inferring with some level of confidence that this is probably a legitimate text, i followed their instructions.

I navigated to the help centre, and searched for the keywords they provided in the text. The help centre article confirms that Rakuten does indeed send these texts, and to click to their chatbot for assistance. Doing so brings me through the steps of,

"yes i can't login to my account"

"yes i know and can access my email"

"yes i tried resetting my password but it still doesn't work"

"yes Rakuten cancelled my orders"

Only then do they link me to the account recovery form.

This workflow is definitely juicing some AI chatbot numbers ("we solved xx million user queries using our AI chatbot")

4. They deleted all information on my account

I submit the form and they respond quickly, within the same day. They apologise for the false positive and reinstate my account. They then tell me that

1. I need to reset my password
2. they cannot reinstate my orders, i need to do that manually
3. they deleted all my security questions and credit card information

These are somewhat understandable security measures, but frustrating nonetheless. If the case is determined to be a false positive and my account remains secure, why delete all my information?

5. Everything is in Japanese only

So i figured it this process out because i understand Japanese. But what if you don't? It'll probably look like this

• Receive text message, ignore because it looks like spam

But if you're somehow conscientious enough to try and determine if it's spam...

• Copy text out to translate
• Assuming you reach the conclusion this isn't spam, go to Rakuten help centre - it's Japanese only. Try to figure out what the right Japanese keyword is to search
• Assuming you figure it out, you'll land on the help article page where.... a bunch of the text is in a screenshot and not copy-and-paste-able
• Assuming you get past that to the chatbot, the chatbot only supports Japanese. Copy and paste every chat message to translate to figure out what buttons to press.
• Assuming you make it to the form, translate the form and fill it in. There's compulsory katakana input for your name - figure out how to input your name in katakana
• Assuming you pass the text field's input checks, submit the form. Receive a response entirely in Japanese, translate. Reset your password.

Nothing in this process considers that the user might potentially not understand Japanese and therefore no provisions, no matter how minor, are provided.

So what should you do if your Rakuten account does get blocked for suspicious activity?

You could do it the long (and maybe safer) way

• If you receive a text, check if the order number actually matches an order ID you received in your email previously
• Check that it has the phrases 楽天市場からSMSが届いた or 利用停止措置
• Copy the phrase 楽天市場からSMSが届いた to the search box in the help page
• Select this option: 楽天会員情報保護のお知らせ(ご注文のキャンセル,楽天IDのログイン停止)
• It will link you to their chatbot, where you have to navigate a series of questions in Japanese, before it sends you to the account recovery form.

Or you can skip all of that, save a click (or many, many, many clicks), and use this form directly: https://customer-form.commerce.rakuten.co.jp/ichiba/common/group/account_recovery_common