Young prey on the old, and vice versa

A 17-year-old high school girl living in Tokyo's Itabashi Ward and a 17-year-old high school boy from Chiba were among four people arrested for attempting to trick a 87-year-old man living in Tokyo's Taito Ward into handing over his ATM cards.

As reported in Nikkan Gendai (Oct 11), one of the girl's cohorts, posing as a policeman over the telephone, first told the targeted victim, "We have arrested a person for criminal fraud. As it seems your cash card was involved, it will be necessary for us to obtain it as evidence." Soon afterward the girl, posing as an employee of the Bank of Japan, telephoned the elderly man and told him, "Our bank has been contacted by the police. We'll send a staff member to your home. Would you mind handing your ATM cards to him for safekeeping?"

When the "banker" came calling, the man handed over three cards to his accounts at a local credit union. Fortunately he'd become suspicious enough to notify the police beforehand. The police tailed the "banker," who led them back to a confederate, and eventually a total of four aspiring crooks, including a 22-year-old Chinese national, were placed under arrest.

Another of the four, a 19-year-old unemployed Chinese national, pleaded innocent, insisting he did not know that what he'd been requested to do involved an illegal scam. The other three confessed, giving "needing money" as their motive.

According to police, the four had been recruited via a job recruitment website that promised "part-time work with high remuneration." Increasingly unable to attract Japanese, the site had been turning to hiring foreign nationals, who in this case arrived at the idea they could pull off the same kind of scams on their own.  

From January through August of this year, the number of "special types of fraud," as such scams are termed, accounted for losses totaling 23.3 billion yen. The police say they have expanded their efforts at both prevention and enforcement, but an investigator told Nikkan Gendai that the crimes "are being run by multiple groups organized on complex lines, and it's taking time to get a grasp of their operations."

From Kansai, meanwhile, Nikkan Gendai's edition of Oct 12 reported a case of a middle-aged man preying on the young. On Oct 9, the Kakogawa police station in Hyogo Prefecture re-arrested 66-year-old retiree Tatsumi Azuma for the second time this year. In late August, Azuma had accosted a high school girl riding her bicycle home from school and asked her name. She made the mistake of telling him. On Sept 2 and 3, he had reportedly waited for her in ambush, but when she did not materialize, he began affixing letter-size notices to utility poles in the neighborhood, which read, "Miss ___. I met you on the street. I was the person with eyeglasses, riding a bicycle and wearing a tank top. I'd be so happy if you contact me."

The young woman whose name was mentioned felt intimidated by the posters and contacted the police, and Azuma was soon arrested in violation of local ordinance against being a public nuisance. He gave his excuse as having "fallen in love with her at first sight." 

Also on Oct 9, notary public Shinya Kobayashi, age 60, was arrested in Nishinomiya City in Hyogo Prefecture on the charge of sending threatening messages via the Line mobile application to a female employee of a "girls bar" in the same municipality.  

Kobayashi, a regular at the bar, was apparently incensed that the woman had not responded to his friendly overtures, and although he had apparently not been under the influence of alcohol nevertheless texted her, "I'm gonna kill you" and similarly nasty threats. He denied to police that he "intended to intimidate her," saying he was "just not good at joking around."

For men over age 60 to behave like stalkers or issue threats to women young enough to be their daughters or granddaughters certainly says something about their own lack of maturity, the writer quips.

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