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scam

Man in Japan told he owes “unpaid adult web site fees,” ends up giving scammers over 100 million yen

First payment sets off string of scams that ran for months.

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Police in Japan warn of new Shinkansen/travel-related scam

Young people especially likely to be target of con that preys on sense of compassion and desire to help.

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Man loses 200 times at crane game, calls police to investigate, staff member loses 300 times too

“That’s just a scam.”

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Tokyo schoolboy assumes other boy’s identity for six months, attends classes at top high school

What the real boy was doing was even weirder.

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Ibaraki Police warn against fake warnings by the police

Hmmm…

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Pre-pubescent boy in Japan uses his high voice to impersonate a schoolgirl in prostitution scam

It’s sure to become one his fondest childhood memories.

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Niigata student tricks woman out of 100,000 yen and two pairs of dirty underwear

Ah, the old dirty-underwear-wrap con. She should have seen it coming.

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Japanese police question man for “not looking good in a suit,” turns out he robbed an old lady

They say justice is blind, but apparently it still has a strong sense of fashion.

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Four foreign men arrested near Tokyo under charges of “international romance fraud”

The men allegedly misrepresented themselves as U.S. military members to cheat victims out of money.

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Wheelchair fraudsters fake disabilities at Tokyo Disneyland, get called “jerks” online

Pair of visitors get called “jerks” online, but we’d have picked a harsher label.

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Old Japanese woman gives over 80 million yen to scam artist in new case of Japan’s oldest scam

Assumption that man on the phone was her son costs senior citizen a gigantic fortune.

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Ludicrously unbelievable diet product claims to convert beer and chicken into water

New breakthrough boldly defies both science and common sense.

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Fake monks targeting foreign visitors to Japan?

Mock monks after your money? On layman‘s terms.

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What happens when you try buying 5,000 followers on Instagram? Our reporter finds out【Experiment】

Our reporter Go Hattori takes the plunge into the greasy underworld of buying social media followers.

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Japanese woman arrested after drugging dates with chocolate, robbing them blind

Although online dating services allow you to peruse profiles of potential paramours from the comfort of your home, they can also be a prime opportunity for fraudsters who pray on the lonely. Last month, for example, we took a look at a ring of dating sites which claimed 2.7 million “users,” only one of whom turned out to be an actual female.

Thankfully, a man from northeastern Japan who joined a dating site actually got to go out with a real girl, and probably thought she was quite the catch, seeing as how she’s decades younger than him and a medical student. Regardless of whether he was looking for something serious or just a fun dinner out, we imagine he was having a great time right up until she drugged him right there in the restaurant and robbed him blind.

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Executives arrested from scam dating sites that had 2.7 million users and only one female member

Dating is never easy, is it? Going out and meeting strangers and talking to them can be painful, awkward, and downright terrifying. Fortunately, Internet dating sites have helped us cut through the trial-and-error process to find people we have deep, personal connections with — or, at least, who swiped right.

Unfortunately, online dating is also ripe for abuse, exploitation, and scams. If ever you needed a cautionary tale for being careful about who you give your money to, this group of dating site executives who ran multiple scam sites should suffice. Of the 2.7 millions users on the site, only one was a woman. The rest of the “women” the male members were chatting with online were all paid fakes!

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Trolled by the crane game: Japan’s UFO Catcher machines are getting increasingly tricky

There’s nothing quite like the joy of pumping shiny coins into a “UFO Catcher” machine or crane game and getting a fuzzy toy in return. As long as you can figure out the machine’s “sweet spot”, you’re almost guaranteed a prize.

But in Japan, where crane games feature a wide variety of prizes including anime figures and snacks, the game designers have been coming up with sneaky ways to trick you into feeding in even more coins in pursuit of a reward. Check out these epic crane game fails…

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Must try harder: This crane game in Japan is laughably bad 【Video】

Crane games, AKA claw games or even “UFO catchers” if you’re in Japan, have always been a bit of a con. This much we know already. They’re designed so that the claws exert barely enough force to grip the trinkets we’re so lusting after, and the prizes are usually worth much less than it costs to actually win one of them to begin with. Even so, they’re great fun, and Japan’s arcades are chock-full of them, luring us in with their various exciting, and sometimes not-so-exciting prizes.

But this particular crane game, which asks arcade goers to attempt to pick up a what appear to be miniature moe-style figurines, is not so much tricky as plain lazy.

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Online seller pulls cruel trick, sells pencil lead photographed alongside Nintendo 3DS XL

The internet is full of awesome stuff, isn’t it? Cute cat videos, like-minded folks to chat with, and Mr. Sato of course. But the internet is also notorious for its dark underworld, where trolls, annoying memes, and fraudsters lurk. When it comes to online jerks, you’ll have trouble finding anyone who is more gleefully evil than the fake online seller.

Here’s the tale of a particularly duplicitous individual whose trickery regarding a Nintendo 3DS XL seemingly led to someone being duped out of 47,000 yen (almost US$400).

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Astro Simpson, Obama the Hedgehog, and more weird/depressing knockoff toys from around the world

Have you heard of the “moron in a hurry test“? It’s a legal test for trademark infringement. Basically, if you can successfully argue that “only a moron in a hurry” could confuse your product with another, you can get away with slightly ripping off somebody else’s design. But you’d have to be a real dingbat to confuse this gallery of 30 knockoff toys for the real things!

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