A woman in her 80s in Ehime Prefecture lost approximately ?1.2 billion ($7.5 million) in a suspected special fraud case, police said Monday, marking the largest scam loss recorded in Japan.
According to the Ehime Prefectural Police, individuals posing as police officers and prosecutors instructed the woman to transfer funds under the pretense of it being part of an investigation into her assets.
The scheme began around Oct. 30 last year, when the woman received a call on her landline from someone claiming to be a pharmacy employee, who told her that her health insurance card had been fraudulently used.
The call was then transferred to someone claiming to be a police officer from Ishikawa Prefecture, who told her that she would need to communicate with him four times a day via social media. She was also contacted by another man on social media claiming to be a prosecutor. The men allegedly sent her messages such as, ¡°We need to investigate your assets,¡± ¡°Please transfer all your money,¡± and ¡°Do not tell anyone under any circumstances.¡±
Between December and February, the woman transferred a total of about ?1.2 billion across eight transactions to an account designated by the suspects, police said.
According to the Asahi Shimbun, the woman was last contacted by the perpetrators on Feb. 13. Feeling anxious, she consulted the prefectural police. The police accepted her report on Saturday and are investigating the case as a special fraud incident.
In a possibly related case, Osaka Prefectural Police also announced on Monday that a woman in her 70s in the prefecture had been defrauded of ?300 million, according to media reports. In a similar pattern, she was told her health insurance card had been fraudulently used and that she needed to have her assets verified. She then opened multiple online accounts and accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges. Under the direction of a man claiming to be a prosecutor, she transferred cryptocurrency 34 times between November and December to an account he designated.
Under the instruction of the scammers, she also opened a bank account, which the Ehime victim was then told to deposit her money into. The woman in her 70s converted this money into cryptocurrency and sent it to the scammers across about 100 transactions between December and February. Police are investigating the connection between the two cases.
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