Hi all, throwaway due to the sensitive nature of the post.
Yesterday, my wife (a Taiwanese) started doing some strange out-of-character behavior, but refused to elaborate when asked. At dinner she seemed quite distracted and afterwards retreated several times to a soundproof room, where it seemed a bit like she was talking to a bank. When more directly confronted, she told me that she had transferred all of the bank account savings that day (3.5 million yen) to buy cryptocurrency coin as part of a new job (which she did not communicate to me about) but that the refund had not come at the end of the day like she was promised.
Upon reviewing what had happened, she looked to have been scouted by a Philippine number, and then a UK number over WhatsApp. The numbers spoke perfect English and had found her number on a job board that she had posted to. They offered her a “job” and an “interview” and led her on to do easy tasks and small transfers throughout the week. They were posing as the company “Robosoftin” which appears to be a legitimate company with a Japan branch, and therefore nothing showed up when she cross-searched the company name with “scam”. However, all the links sent to her had changed the domain name from “.com” to something else that duplicated exactly the company’s website and looked legitimate, but also had the “employee trading platform”. They appeared to be targeting desperate English speaking Gaijin looking for jobs and had the target transfer money to various Japanese banks and then the money was refunded with “interest”. There was even a group chat with a whole bunch of other “traders”.
Then, yesterday, they butchered the pig and had the wife send all the money to various Japanese name bank accounts at Japanese banks.
I learned of this late last night and we were at the police station until early this morning. Unfortunately, because all the communications were in WhatsApp, in English, with thousands of messages and a quite elaborate, multi-level scam, the police detectives were very confused and in the end refused to classify it immediately as a 詐欺事件。They said the best they could do was to provide a 相談番号.
We are back home, devastated, and with empty bank accounts. Does anyone have any advice on what we can and should do next? We contacted the destination banks, but their 振込詐欺 services do not open until Monday. We unfortunately cannot speak very good Japanese either, although I can manage enough.
by ScammedVictim5942