AICHI (TR) – Police in Nagoya have arrested a 30-year-old Osaka man for allegedly recruiting a Japanese national to work for a transnational fraud syndicate based in Cambodia, reports Tokai TV (June 30).
Katsuya Yamamoto, a self-described self-employed worker, is accused of conspiring with accomplices between April and May two years ago to send a then-28-year-old man to a scam group operating out of Poipet, a Cambodian casino town on the Thai border.
According to investigators, Yamamoto and his associates scoured social media for individuals seeking a yami-baito (dark part-time job).
They allegedly lured the man into the criminal enterprise with promises of lucrative payouts, telling him, “We are looking for people overseas. Some people have made millions of yen a month.”
Enticed by the offer, the recruit traveled to Cambodia and spent six months working as a kakeko — a scammer tasked with phoning victims in Japan to defraud them — before eventually returning home.
Police suspect Yamamoto pocketed a 1-million-yen bounty for successfully recruiting the man. Authorities have withheld whether Yamamoto has admitted to the allegations as they continue to investigate the inner workings of the overseas syndicate.
