Three former employees of a home-renovation company in Tokyo were sentenced Wednesday to two years in prison over a fraud scheme aimed at tricking mainly elderly people into signing contracts for unnecessary renovations.
The three are Kazuhiro Kuwabara, 26, Nobuhisa Ito, 26, and Koji Hashikabe, 29, all of whom were employees of Samunin East, which is now called Riburo.
According to the ruling handed down at the Tokyo District Court, Kuwabara defrauded a Tokyo woman in her 70s and another elderly home owner of around 1.9 million yen between December 2002 and November 2003. The woman was told her home would collapse if an earthquake occurred because its pillars were rotten.
Ito and Hashikabe defrauded a man in his 50s in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, of about 500,000 yen and conducted other similar frauds, according to the ruling.
Prosecutors had demanded three years in prison for the three.
In connection with the home renovation fraud, another former Samunin employee, Satoru Kamata, was sentenced to two years in prison in October.
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