Twenty-five Japanese men were extradited from Cambodia on Wednesday and arrested by Japanese police after a phone scam operation they allegedly conducted resulted in damages of at least hundreds of millions of yen, investigative sources have said.
On Tuesday morning, a joint task force of around 30 investigators from several Japanese prefectural police authorities was dispatched to Phnom Penh International Airport in Cambodia to help with the transfer of the suspects.
According to investigative sources, the suspects, between the ages of 20 and 42, made fraudulent phone calls from Cambodia posing as nursing home staff and lawyers, aiming to scam victims in Japan. They ran their operation out of an apartment in Phnom Penh, which is believed to have been their base. TV Asahi reported that 16 of the suspects are in their 20s.
The allegations against the men include making a fraudulent phone call to a 70-year-old woman in Hokkaido around August and defrauding her of ?500,000. They claimed she had won the right to move into a nursing home. Under the guise of resolving issues related to her move into the home, they allegedly swindled ?450,000 in cash and ?50,000 in digital currency.
Japanese police believe the groups ringleader and other accomplices remain at large, as an apartment in Tokyo to which the victim mailed the cash was found to be empty.
On Sept. 11, Cambodian authorities received a tip-off from the Japanese Embassy in Cambodia that several Japanese nationals were involved in an alleged scam and apprehended 25 individuals at an apartment in the Cambodian capital.
The authorities confiscated dozens of mobile phones, personal computers and documents that appear to be manuals detailing how to defraud victims. Roughly 20 cell phones had apparently been destroyed to erase evidence, local investigative sources have said.
Local authorities are trying to track three Japanese men who are believed to have fled to neighboring Thailand to escape the raid.
There has been a spate of scam operations originating from Cambodia recently, with 19 Japanese nationals arrested in April for allegedly making scam calls from the Southeast Asian country to Japan.
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