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GLOBALMalwareRetail & ConsumerRetailRansomwareThegentlemenRansom DemandedActor NamedMedium

Sarku Japan

bd_74cf2670efc95dad · schema v1 · pii pii-v2

Severity

Medium

Discovered

Filed

Sep 14, 2026

To disclose

Affected

Not disclosed

Confidence

50%
Full breach record for Sarku Japan5 incidents on file

Threat-actor claim — not a regulatory filing

This row is a claim by the ransomware group Thegentlemen on its public extortion blog. It has not been validated by the victim or any regulator. Treat attribution and counts as the threat actor's assertion until a regulatory filing or victim disclosure corroborates them.

Group activity: Retail & E-CommerceDiscovered: 2026-09-15

Source: Ransomware.live

Post text · scraped from the leak site

sarkujapan.com zoominfo.com/c/sarku-japan/33898946 SARKU Japan Japan's #1 independent service & wholesale network for foreign cars — founded 1993 in Chiba by Texan David J. Jones (in Japan since 1989) after seeing that owners of European/American cars in Japan were "orphans": parts take 6–8 weeks from Europe, service is scarce. SARKU built the full foreign-car infrastructure: 9 service centers (8 Kanto + Nagoya), a wholesale yard of ~4,000 imported cars (one of Japan's two largest), a parts warehouse of 30,000+ SKUs worth ¥700M+ (also one of Japan's two largest), plus procurement/export arms via US offices in Seattle (since 1997) and Florida — selling 20,000+ cars and serving 60,000+ active customers (~150 staff from 15 countries; ~120K monthly site visitors, 170K+ downloaded car-buying guides). Since 2018 it's owned by the Netherlands' Louwman Group (Europe's largest family-run dealer group, est. 1923). Motto: "Foreign cars. Japanese precision."

Incident timeline — mostly unverified

? — ?

Breach window unknown

Sep 14, 2026

Claim posted

No filing yet · watching

Compliance clocks stay unassessable until a regulatory filing lands. Dashed segments fill in automatically when corroboration arrives.

Claim → filing

Compliance clock

Not assessable

Tracked as a single-filing incident — the only disclosure on record for this event so far.Unverified claimView incident

Evidence ladder

Leak-site claimThis record

Attacker assertion only. Establishes: claim date, group, alleged victim.

Press / market report

Unlocks: incident narrative, operational impact. Still no compliance clock.

State AG / regulator filing

Unlocks: discovery date, data types, affected count, compliance clock.

SEC 8-K / victim statement

Unlocks: materiality, stated response, full audit trail. Ceiling removed.

No regulatory filing corroborates this yet — it is the attacker's own assertion. Watch this entity to be notified the moment a filing corroborates or contradicts it.

Source ceiling

  • actor name
  • victim claim
  • ransom/leak status
  • discovery date
  • materiality
  • notification
  • affected count
  • confirmed data types
  • compliance clock

The ✕ fields stay blank until a regulatory filing or victim disclosure lands.

About this groupFirst seen 2023-02-28

thegentlemen

According to ransomware.live, The Gentlemen is a RaaS group that emerged in July–August 2025, rapidly claiming over 320 victims across 17+ countries by offering affiliates a 90% revenue share, deploying a Go-based locker against Windows, Linux, NAS, and BSD systems; a compromised C2 server in 2026 revealed more than 1,570 linked victims.

870 tracked hereFull profile →