Police on Tuesday arrested a former member of a high-profile quasi-gang group called Kanto Rengo for his alleged involvement in a phone scam operation in Cambodia.
Thai authorities detained the former Kanto Rengo member, Tetsuya Yamaguchi, last month, and a joint police task force of three prefectures including Saitama, brought him to Japan on Tuesday.
Yamaguchi, 46, denied the allegations against him, saying he has no knowledge of the case, according to police sources.
Yamaguchi is believed to have led a phone scam group whose six members have been arrested. He is said to have delivered meals from his Japanese restaurant to a base where they ran the phone scams.
The police task force will investigate his possible involvement in other phone scams as several other fraud groups are also based in Cambodia.
In the case for which Yamaguchi was arrested, he is suspected of conspiring with the six group members to have a woman in her 70s in Osaka Prefecture transfer some ¥296,000 to a designated bank account on Sept. 15, 2022, by pretending to be a public health official and telling her over the phone that she could receive a refund of medical expenses. The money was withdrawn from an ATM in the city of Koshigaya, Saitama.
Yamaguchi's alleged involvement in the case surfaced after the police analyzed data from a smartphone used by a 38-year-old man charged in a Vietnam-based phone scam.
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