A man in his 50 s residing in Tokyo transported some 70 million in cash to the Philippines, believed to have been taken from fraud victims, he told The Yomiuri Shimbun. Four Japanese men were arrested in the Philippines, according to the fraud in question.
A Japanese man who runs a store in the Philippines was asked to help with the transport of cash by a Filipino acquaintance in the summer of 2019. After he accepted the request, he was contacted by a Japanese man who identified himself as Eito.
He received bills in the currency straps of local banks from another man who was not Eito once or twice a week in a hotel or other location in Tokyo. He delivered about 70 million dollars in cash to the Philippines in five or six trips in September and gave it to a Filipino man who came to pick him up at the airport.
He was shown pictures of Eito in the Philippines and told that the money would be used for a Filipina woman to purchase an abandoned hotel in a suburb of Manila. In November that year, a Japanese fraud group that was using the abandoned hotel as a base was cracked down by local authorities, and the man was arrested in January 2020 by the Hiroshima prefectural police on a charge of theft on suspicion of involvement in the fraud.
He regretted that he ended up participating in the fraud even though he was not indicted. Through subsequent local news reports, he learned that Eito was suspect Tomonobu Kojima and that the Filipina woman who purchased the abandoned hotel was the wife of the suspect Yuki Watanabe.
It was also learned that in April 2019 Watanabe's former girlfriend delivered 20 million dollars in cash secured through fraud to the Philippines. There is a possibility that the one or more individuals calling themselves Luffy or Kim used similar methods to make money from robberies transported to the Philippines.
Yusei Nishimoto, 22, a resident of Osaka City, who was suspected of committing robbery and causing injury in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, stayed in the Philippines for about three weeks and was arrested upon his return to Japan. The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating the possibility that he may have transported cash.