We’ve all seen those pop-ups that sometimes appear on particularly dodgy sites, demanding that you pay a ridiculous amount of money.
Most of the time, you can click away and rest easy that it’s a bluff.
But sometimes people do pay.
Spare a thought for this Japanese man in his fifties, living in the frigid northernly city of Sapporo. He kept himself warm by watching some porn online.
But then he got a text to his phone in October from someone claiming to be NTT Finance, which is a genuine company (a subsidiary of the telecommunications giant). He duly rang the number in the message, only to find himself speaking to someone who claimed to be from a certain NTS Debt Collection — once again, the name of an actual company.
They asserted that the man owed money — specifically, porn site fees.
Not being too savvy in the ways of the web, he immediately transferred the fee to the bank account number they supplied.
That alone is a cautionary enough tale, perhaps, both for educating yourself about scams and online porn, but then the man started to receive further demands over the next two months.
These were from other security “representatives” who claimed, for instance, his phone had caused a virus to spread, and he had to pay damages.
It was only after dozens of payments, totaling ¥109 million (US$1.05 million), that the unnamed man finally got suspicious and recently went to the police, whose investigations revealed that he had been shelling out his cash to scammers.
The police shared the story with the media, where we saw it, but there’s no word if the fraudsters were caught.
