Digital payments services have become a tempting target for cyber-thieves as their popularity surges around the world. Ant Financial, which is controlled by billionaire Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, is estimated to handle more than half of China’s $17 trillion in annual online payments. Formally known as Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group, it leveraged Alipay’s popularity to expand into everything from asset management to insurance, credit scoring and lending. It serves more than 800 million customers. Tencent’s rival payments offering is a key component of the social media service WeChat, which has a billion-plus users.

On Friday, the company revealed that stolen data on 14 million users included birth dates, employers, education and lists of friends. For 15 million users, it was restricted to just name and contact details.

A memo, prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives, warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica, the WSJ report said

Larger companies were more likely to report using avoidance strategies – among companies with more than $1 billion in revenues, 82% stated that they had scaled back investments, and 86% had avoided future investments. Companies most frequently reported scaling back investments in Nigeria, Iran, Russia and Venezuela.