AICHI (TR) – Aichi Prefectural Police have arrested a 40-year-old matchmaking agency executive and four other men on suspicion of fraud for allegedly running a cryptocurrency scam that used women as decoys on dating apps, reports Kyodo News (Sep. 2).
Yuta Ishida, a corporate executive from the town of Aizumisato, Fukushima Prefecture, and his accomplices are accused of defrauding a 39-year-old office worker from Tama City, Tokyo out of approximately 150,000 yen worth of cryptocurrency between October and November 2025.
Police did not reveal whether the suspects admit to the allegations.
According to police, the syndicate recruited women on social media by offering them a “side job” doing sales assistance for a matchmaking agency. The women were then instructed to create profiles on dating apps, chat with male users, and extract their Line IDs.
Once the targets were lured onto the messaging app, the suspects allegedly took over the communications, urging the men to make investments and eventually swindling them out of their digital assets.
The scale of the operation appears to be massive. Investigators revealed that smartphones seized during the arrests contained a database of contact information for approximately 5,600 men.
Police are continuing to analyze the confiscated devices to uncover the full extent of the syndicate’s fraudulent activities.
