CHIBA (TR) – Chiba Prefectural Police last week arrested the former director of a dental clinic in Chiba City who is suspected of defrauding multiple patients out of more than 100 million yen, reports Chiba Nippo (June 19).
Thus far, police have accused Jinichi Takahashi, the 58-year-old former director of Takahashi Dental Office in Chiba City, of defrauding a female patient in her 50s out of a total of 4 million yen regarding the insertion of dental implants on March 2021.
Police said that Takahashi lied to the woman, falsely telling her that the manufacturer of the implants would refund the treatment fee (2 million yen) if she provided her medical records to an academic society. He also collected an additional 2 million yen under the pretext of a “cooperation fee” for the manufacturer that was also to be returned.
Upon his arrest on suspicion of fraud, Takahashi declined to comment, police said. “I will remain silent until I speak with my lawyer,” he said.
Police have received complaints from over a dozen patients. The total amount lost is expected to exceed 100 million yen.
One patient who spoke to the Chiba Nippo revealed, “They didn’t move forward with the treatment at all, and no matter how many times I asked, they never returned the cooperation fee.”
Police have also revealed that Takahashi has been in arrears on rent for the dental clinic by more than 7 million yen since around 2013.
Takahashi also has not paid his employees’ salaries since around January of last year. Further, he has been running the dental clinic alone since around April.
Police are investigating the possibility that Takahashi may have defrauded the money from the victims to raise funds to cover those expenses.
Not completing the treatments
According to sources, Takahashi filed for bankruptcy in June last year with debts of approximately 1.7 billion yen.
The implant treatment requires a metal shaft to be embedded in the jawbone and an artificial tooth attached. It is generally an elective medical treatment. Therefore, it is not uncommon for the treatment to be expensive. The problem was that Takahashi was collecting money from the victims but not completing the treatments. The victims also were not receiving the promised returns of the cooperation fees.
A couple who paid a total of about 7.5 million yen in treatment costs and subsidies to Takahashi agreed to an interview with TV Asahi (June 20).
The woman, aged in her 40s, first met Takahashi when she got a second opinion on a cavity treatment in 2017.
“Since you’ve come all the way here, the initial consultation is free, so you should take this opportunity to get a CT scan of your teeth and have them examined in detail,” he reportedly told her. “It’s not just this one tooth that’s the problem, you have four teeth that need implants.”
“I want my teeth back”
The woman had been going for regular check-ups every month. She had never been told that she needed an implant, so she was confused when she was told this.
“He said that I should consider myself lucky that it was found early. He said my jaw bone will waste away if I did not get treatment quickly,” she says.
What she was worried about was the cost of treatment. Given this, she initially refused but he made her an offer.
“If I could pay up to 1.5 million yen, he could replace all my silver fillings with ceramic ones, and he’d also do maintenance after that,” she says. “I think I was tricked by the words ‘lifetime guarantee’ that he used.”
She accepted the offer. Her and her husband then paid a total of 5 million yen for the treatment.
After that, Takahashi explained to her that if she paid an additional 5 million yen for the aforementioned cooperation fees the full 10 million yen would be returned. She subsequently paid half of that amount (2.5 million yen) but the treatment never progressed and she did not get her money back. There is also a possibility that Takahashi removed healthy teeth.
“I was told they would remove four teeth, but when I woke up, five were gone,” she says. “I thought, ‘Did I hear five? Well, I’m already out of teeth.'”
In the end, she went to Takahashi’s clinic for about eight years, but he was never able to complete treatment for a single tooth. “They took my money, they took my time, and I want my teeth back,” she says.
“I heard that when he was doing well, he drove a Mercedes,” his father tells TV Asahi during an interview. “We were farmers, so we had a tractor and lots of machines, but we sold them all, and gave it to him. He told me that we had to pay a certain amount to him by a certain date. So I had no choice but to do something about it.”
