The man who was cheated by a black market worker to steal 1,500 Pokémon cards: The horrifying true face of a man who “did not receive a reward of more than a million dollars.

Akihabara, Tokyo, at dawn.

A man wearing gloves breaks the entrance window with a tool and enters a trading card store in a multi-tenant building. The man breaks the showcase and quickly puts the cards on display into a bag he is carrying. After stealing the merchandise, he disappeared into the deserted city.

By June 13, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Investigation Division 3 arrested Masaki Omori, 35, of Urasoe City, Okinawa Prefecture, on suspicion of breaking into a building and stealing. Pokemon cards are said to be worth several hundred million yen if they are rare.

The suspect Omori applied for a dark job through Twitter. In the application section of the black-market job, he was offered a high reward. The day before the incident, the Omori suspect boarded a plane to Tokyo at his own expense and rented a car in Ibaraki Prefecture. The man who gave him the instructions gave him a hammer and gloves, and after the crime he handed over those tools and a bag containing numerous stolen cards.

The suspect’s involvement was discovered through security camera footage. He admitted to the police that he was “having trouble making ends meet. On the other hand, he also stated that he did not receive the promised one million yen, so it is possible that it was a black market job without remuneration.

(A reporter from a national newspaper).

There have been four other thefts of Pokémon cards in Tokyo this year, including an attempted theft. The police are investigating the connection to the black market job.

The “black market job” operator offers the perpetrator a “10 million yen reward for robbery,” “1 million yen per day,” and other favorable terms. The location and time of the attacks are decided based on a “black market list” that includes the addresses and telephone numbers of target stores and residences. Sometimes there are multiple perpetrators. In some cases, the perpetrators do not even know each other’s names and meet for the first time at the scene of the crime.

The instructor does not only give specific instructions to the perpetrators. They also seem to terrorize and control them.

Some of them use Telegram, a communication app that deletes information after a certain period of time, and ask the perpetrators to send their mug shots and images of their identification documents, such as driver’s licenses, to them. Once the images were sent, a message to the effect that ‘if you run away, you will be in terrible trouble. Since they had even told their family members, they could not simply leave, fearing that even their relatives would be harmed.

In fact, one of the perpetrators stated, “A stranger came to my house out of the blue,” and “I thought I was being watched. I thought I was being watched. I’ve joined a terrible organization. I hear that many of them, like Omori, were cheated and cried themselves to sleep because they were not paid what they were promised.

The stolen Pokémon cards have not been found (as of June 13). Following the arrest of the Omori suspect, the police are hurrying to find out who is responsible for the instructions.