Three students from Japan have been arrested on charges of phone fraud, which according to authorities earned them profits of 4 million dollars.
The 17-year-olds are believed to have carried out several Ore ore or “It's me” scams as they are known in Japan. Their targets were usually the elderly. The underage scammers would call their victims, pretending to be a relative who was having a problem.
They would ask a victim to transfer a (usually large) amount of money to a bank account to pay a lawyer, or yakuza gangsters, and so on.
The three students were arrested on Thursday when they tried to withdraw more than $90,000 that had been deposited by a 60-year-old couple, according to NHK.
The couple apparently transferred the money after receiving a phone call from a person pretending to be their son. The scammers convinced them that their son needed the money because he had beaten up a woman.
Two of the students were caught red-handed, while the third denies any involvement.
After conducting searches at the suspects' homes, police discovered 550 cards and names of the gang's victims. The names were linked to 160 phone scams the minors had carried out since July 2013, according to NHK.
Source: secnews.gr
