This woman was the target of a criminal scheme, but she definitely wasn’t going the be the victim of it.
Over the past few weeks, Japan has seen a sharp spike in the number of data leaks and cyberattacks, with many organizations warning citizens that their personal information may have been compromised. So on October 21, when a 93-year-old woman living in the town of Aisho, Shiga Prefecture, received a phone call from a man informing her that he was a police officer, and that there had been an unauthorized withdrawal of funds from her back account, it was cause for concern.
He did assure her, though, that because the problem had been detected quickly, they could remedy it in a swift manner too. The police would need her help to do so, though. First, he instructed her to freeze her bank account. Second, he said that the authorities would need to examine her ATM card, but to make that part of the process as convenient as possible for her, he said that he could send an investigator to pick the card up at her home. Finalizing that pickup time took a little extra conversation, with the woman talking to the man on the phone the next day as well, but eventually they agreed that the investigator would come that very day, October 22, to take come get the card.
Now, there are a number of warning lights that might be going off in your head right now. For starters, if there’s been some kind of anomaly with your bank account, it’s usually your bank that will contact you, not the police. Your bank will probably want to be part of the conversation too if you need to relinquish possession of your ATM card, and it’s also sort of unusual for the police to do house calls to pick up evidence rather than asking you to come down to the station.
So it’s pretty clear that the woman was the target of scammers. Unfortunately, this sort of scheme, taking advantage of senior citizens’ trusting nature and confusion regarding technology and bureaucracy, is a time-tested, reliable way of defrauding them, and the 47-year-old man who came to pick up the her ATM card was probably feeling smugly satisfied from proving his superior intellect compared to the befuddled woman.
However, the woman turned out to be far savvier than the fraudster had bargained for. She hadn’t been sitting in her living room wringing her hands between phone calls. She’d sniffed out that this was a scam, so she got in touch with the nearby Higashiomi Precinct of the Shiga Prefectural Police. She then pretended to have been fooled, but when the man pretending to be a police officer came to her house, there was a squad of real police officers already there, lying in wait, and instead of getting the woman’s ATM card, the man got arrested.
As he hasn’t entered a plea or gone to trial, yet, currently his arrest is for “suspicion of attempted fraud.” Honestly, though, of you show up at the door of an elderly woman who’s never met you before and tell her she needs to give you her ATM card, the only possible explanation other than fraud would be if you were robbing her, so things aren’t looking good for him from a legal standpoint either way.
It’s unclear whether the man who came to the woman’s home is the same man who’d called her on the phone, but police (the real police) believe that he was working with other criminals to set up the scam, so hopefully they’ll be apprehended as well, perhaps with the help of an equally large network of tough-as-nails grannies.
Source: Kyoto Shimbun via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso
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