A 23-year-old woman was among the group of criminals… Manualized “rip-off” method of abusing matching apps

What are the characteristics of the target male?

Wants to go to a bar.

She lured a man she met on a matching app to a rip-off bar, where she and other members waited for him and blackmailed him. They locked him up until the next morning and made him pay a large sum of money.

By June 19, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had arrested six people suspected to be members of the rip-off group on suspicion of fraud and other crimes. Among them were the leader of the group, bar employee Shunta Suzuki (22), Hiroto Kasai (24), and five other men, along with one woman, Hiyori Kumagai (23). Their crimes were cleverly manualized. The contents of the manual can be found at …….

In March and April of this year, Kumagai lured two men in their 20s whom she met through a matching app to a rip-off bar using the opening words, and the male members, including Suzuki, charged them 450,000 yen for food and drink, which they paid 220,000 yen. But it did not end there.

The suspect Kasai got on their case and kept them locked up in a sauna until the next morning. After that, Suzuki made the victim sign a loan agreement with several consumer finance companies under the guise of compensating the restaurant for damages, claiming that the restaurant had to cancel the reservation because of the two victims’ treatment, and then extorted 2 million yen in cash. In addition, they are suspected of having the victim purchase six gold necklaces and other items. They created a manual for such crimes and determined the characteristics of the men they were targeting,” said a reporter from a national newspaper’s society department.

The manual included such characteristics as “men in their 20s who cannot be licked,” “those who live far from the city center,” “those who are lazy, have little experience with women, and do not seem to get angry,” and “those who drink heavily and often,” and it is believed that the Kumagai suspects ransacked the site through a matching app.

The suspect Suzuki, who was the leader of the group, admitted the charge to the Metropolitan Police Department, saying, “We are sure that we did it. Former Kanagawa Prefectural Police detective and crime journalist Taihei Ogawa explains.

This is probably another new form of crime by special fraud groups. Rip-off bars have been a scam since the Showa period (1926-1989), but recently, customers are not falling for them anymore, even if they are approached on the street. So, matching apps are being used more and more to find manual targets and lead them to stores. The suspect, Kumagai, is a young woman of 23 years old and looks normal. Perhaps she was recruited for a part-time job using a matching app as a so-called “white case,” and then got involved in a crime and stuck with the group as it was.

The fact that the group leader is very young, 22 years old, suggests the existence of a huge special fraud group in the background. Special fraud groups always continue to commit crimes like this, changing their forms little by little, so it is becoming increasingly difficult to detect crimes before they occur.

It is now common knowledge that young people use matching apps as a place to meet people, but the evil hand of special fraud groups is spreading to such places as well.