TOKYO (TR) – Chiba Prefectural Police have filed charges against employees of a Tokyo-based online dating service in which men posed as women for swindling more than six billion yen from users, reports the Mainichi Shimbun (Oct. 3).
In June, police arrested Tetsuo Miura, the 43-year-old president of Friars Square, based in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward, and 15 other employees on suspicion of fraud.
The online deai-kei operation employed 23 persons, 17 of whom were men, to pretend to be females seeking male partners. The site had 2.7 million users but only one was a woman. The operation utilized 42 computers from inside an apartment in Taito Ward.
The 23 staff members were also sent to prosecutors.
Members were charged 250 for each time that they contacted what they thought was a female member of the site. Between 2004 and 2014, the company collected 6.6 billion yen in revenue.
One victim, a 59-year-old man from Kanagawa Prefecture, spent 13.58 million yen on the service.
