Tokyo Police Arrest Man for Alleged PayPay Fraud

Tokyo, June 17 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo police have arrested a 33-year-old man for allegedly using smartphone payment app PayPay to defraud electronic money from an individual, people familiar with the investigation said Wednesday. The suspect, Masanobu Kimura, a resident of Sapporo, a city in Hokkaido, northern Japan, has denied part of the allegations, the people said. The Metropolitan Police Department received about 180 reports on similar cases last year alone. Kimura allegedly received instructions in Chinese on highly secure messaging app Telegram, using a translation app. The police believe that a “tokuryu” anonymous crime group was involved. On Aug. 14, 2025, Kimura and others allegedly conspired to send an email to a woman who ordered from an online shopping website, saying that she would be given a refund due to a lack of inventory. On messaging app Line, they are suspected of sending quick response, or QR, codes for money transfers on PayPay and defrauding her out of 217,690 yen in e-money through four transfers. After the woman was told that she needed to go through a procedure to lift a restriction on money transfers, she received an instruction in a voice call from another Line account to enter a verification code. In reality, she was entering the amount of money that would be transferred out of her account. Kimura told investigators that he had applied for the job after seeing a post on social media platform X several years ago, according to the people familiar with the investigation. He also admitted that he was a recruiter for schemes involving the unauthorized use of people’s credit card information. The police launched the investigation into the matter after consultation from the PayPay operator side in September. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]