Senior regular customer’s shopping trip was very different, and much more expensive, than his usual ones.

On the night of April 21, an elderly man walked into the Namioka Fukuda branch of convenience store chain Lawson in Aomori City, Aomori Prefecture. Working the register at that time was the store’s manager, 45-year-old Indonesian national Heni Susilawati.

Susilawati recognized the man, since he’s one of her regular customers. However, there were a few things that made this shopping run different from his usual ones. For starters, the man usually comes in in the morning, and second, this time he was buying something he’d never purchased at the store before: prepaid online payment cards.

Granted, we’re living in an age where more and more people are ordering stuff online, but the two cards the man brought to the register had a combined total value of 180,000 yen (US$1,240), which is a whole lot for someone who hadn’t previously displayed such enthusiasm for e-commerce. So Susilawati asked the man what sort of payment he was planning to make using the cards, and he informed her:

“My computer got infected with a virus. I have to buy these to pay for the repairs.”

That’s not how PC maintenance is supposed to work, though, so Susilawati strongly suspected the man was being scammed. She tried several times to talk the man out of buying the cards, but each time he cheerfully brushed aside her concern, saying “No, it’s not a scam. I need to fix my computer.”

With Susilawati unable to convince him, the man completed his purchase and left the store, but she was still worried about him, and so she contacted the police and told them what had happened. By examining security camera footage, the quick-working investigators were able to follow the man’s path from the store back to his home. Once they’d determined his location, officers were dispatched, and they were able to convince the man not to hand over the card information to the party claiming to he needed to pay them for repairs.

▼ The Lawson where the incident took place. They’re currently hiring part-time staff, by the way, in case anyone wants to work with Susilawati.

The incident comes as Aomori is strengthening its efforts to prevent fraud. According to the Aomori Prefectural Police Department, in 2024 investigators prevented roughly 27.29 million yen (US$188,000) from being transferred from private citizens to scammers, more than three times the amount for 2021. However, you can’t prevent money from being lost in frauds unless it was targeted in the first place, showing that there are still plenty of crooks going after people in Aomori, and as is often the case, senior citizens are some of the most at-risk individuals.

Susilawati says she’s happy to have been able to save someone from getting ripped off, and that she’ll continue to tell customers, of all ages, that they might be getting scammed if the transactions they’re making seem fishy. It’s a sign of Japan’s growing internationalization that foreign-born service convenience store workers aren’t just responsible for stocking shelves and ringing up purchases, but now are helping with crime prevention too.

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, Lawson
Top image: Pakutaso
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