200 Million Yen Sustained Benefit Fraud Case: Acquaintance Tells of the Perpetrator’s Unscrupulous Side
Hiroki Matsue, 31, suspect in financial trouble at a bar in Roppongi, and suspicious investment seminars for students. 17 people including National Tax Bureau officials were arrested.
“Matsue has always been the type of person who wants to make himself look big. He was always flaunting the brand-name goods he had bought, and often blurted out, ‘I own real estate at my age,'” said an acquaintance of Matsue’s.
A huge fraud case in which a man is believed to have swindled 200 million yen in benefits for the prevention of the new Corona virus. The main suspect in the case is Daiki Matsue, 31. Matsue was arrested in June when he returned to Japan from Dubai, where he had fled, and was re-arrested on July 4 on suspicion of defrauding another 1 million yen in benefits.
A total of 17 people were arrested in this case, including Kohei Tsukamoto, 24, an active Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau official. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department suspects that Matsue was the instructor of the group and is continuing a corroborative investigation.
After graduating from university, Matsue once found a job, but quit his job to at the office and became involved in a pyramid scheme.
“Until a few years ago, he ran a meat bar near the east exit of Ebisu Station and called himself a businessman. On the other hand, he was enthusiastically giving lectures on pyramid schemes to university students. People around him were aware that Matsue is a scammer who makes money through pyramid schemes. He also frequently held shady seminars for students at his favorite shisha bar in Ebisu,” said a former employee of the company.
In November 2017, Matsue opened a bar in Roppongi with an acquaintance. When he first opened the bar, Matsue is said to have said boldly, “‘I have a lot of friends.”
He boasted, “I have a lot of friends, so I can invite a lot of customers. But no one Matsue knew came to the bar at all. He must have been identified for a pyramid scheme, and all his friends left him.”
A little over a year after the bar opened, financial troubles also arose.
“Suddenly, Matsue started making a fuss, saying, ‘The store’s money, 3 million yen, has been withdrawn without permission! But it was Matsue, the president of the company, who was in charge of the store’s bank book. Other staff members did not even know the account number. Matsue treated one of the management staff as the culprit, but everyone suspected the money-hungry Matsue of acting on his own. In the end, the bar was closed because of that incident.”
The money-hungry man then ended up committing benefit fraud. When questioned by the police, Matsue reportedly stated that “my friends did it on their own.”
From the July 22, 2022 issue of FRIDAY
PHOTO.： Shinji Hasuo (2nd)
