Japan police arrest 15 scam suspects held in Thailand

May 24, 2019

Tokyo--Japanese police arrested Friday all 15 Japanese men who were detained in Thailand for their alleged involvement in a large-scale scam targeting people in their home country.

They were arrested by Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department and three other Japanese police forces while being transferred from Thailand on a plane bound for Tokyo International Airport at Haneda.

The arrested men, in their 20s to 50s, include Yasutaka Toyama, 54, Ryu Iwamoto, 23, and Seiji Ikehara, 33.

They are suspected of sending an e-mail from Thailand to a woman in her 50s in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan, to demand payment of a fake invoice for browsing fees for a subscription website and defrauding her of an electronic gift card worth 300,000 yen she used as payment for the fake invoice on March 29.

On the same day, the Thai police arrested the 15 Japanese men on suspicion of working illegally in the Southeast Asian country and confiscated through a search of their base in Pattaya, a resort south of Bangkok, items such as telephones, personal computers and manuals for tricking fraud targets.

They are believed to have swindled Japanese victims out of over 200 million yen.

According to the Thai police, the 15 men are from eight different prefectures, mainly in the Kyushu southwestern region.

Japanese investigators will work on bringing to light the full picture of the fraud committed by the 15 men. Jiji Press