KANAGAWA (TR) – Kanagawa Prefectural Police have arrested five suspected members of a fraud ring whose headquarters was found to contain a manual and a list of potential victims, reports Nippon News Network (Feb. 6).
On Tuesday, Riku Nakazaki, 21, Yuki Mizushima, 23, and three other persons allegedly conspired to fraudulently obtain two bank cards from a woman, aged in her 80s and living in Tokyo. The suspects then used the cards to withdraw 500,000 yen in cash from her accounts.
In carrying out the ruse, one of the suspects posed as a bank employee on the telephone, telling the woman that her “bank cards are old and need to be replaced with new ones.”
Officers later raided the headquarters of the ring, located in an unspecified location in capital, and seized a manual that explains how to carry out such frauds and lists of names of 38,000 elderly persons, some of which came from university graduation registers.
Securities transaction
In a separate case, Kanagawa police arrested three other men over the alleged swindle of 5 million yen from a woman, aged in her 60s and living in Yokohama, also reports Nippon News Network.
Like the aforementioned case, the woman was given the opportunity to buy a security by a person posing as a bank employee on the telephone. The three suspects are then believed to have collected the funds. They all deny the allegations, police said.
Police believe the ring carried out similar crimes in about 75 cases in the prefecture, swindling victims out of around 1 billion yen.
