Last week I posted "Doofus Of The Day #1,092", about a municipality in Japan that mistakenly transferred a large sum of money to a recipient who - mirabile dictu! - "could not" return it.
Well, now we know why he couldn't.
The blunder happened when ... 463 low-income households were meant to receive 100,000 yen ($770; £620) each as part of a government scheme to ease financial strain caused by the pandemic.
But on 8 April, all of the funding - 46.3m yen - was accidentally deposited into the man's personal bank account.
An investigation has since found that he withdrew 600,000 yen every day for about two weeks, local media reports.
When authorities finally contacted him, he said he no longer had the money.
"I've already moved the money. It can't be returned," he is quoted as saying. "It cannot be undone any more. I will not run. I will pay for my crime."
However he has now disappeared.
Speaking to media on Tuesday, the man's lawyer said ... [he] had used his smartphone to gamble away all of the money through online casino sites ... "I don't currently have the money and I don't have anything with property value at hand. It's actually difficult to return it," the lawyer quoted him as saying, according to The Asahi Shimbun.
There's more at the link.
One can only shake one's head at his financial fecklessness and incompetence. If I'd received that money and been minded to steal it, I'd have least have put a big chunk of it into something of lasting value, like gold coins or jewelry. To throw it all away on gambling . . . that's compounding the theft, with stupidity as the cherry on top.
Oh, well. Now he has the fun choice of either paying it back, or spending a few years in the rather unsympathetic Japanese prison system.
Peter
5 comments:
Peter:
Your story is incomplete.
You would buy assets from untracable sources using cash. Perhaps in smaller amounts over the period of many weeks.
Then when confronted you would claim you had lost it gambling and could not recover it. It is your cover story. Then the cops would not tear your house apart looking for your stash of pawn-shop jewelry, ammo, artwork and the like.
It's interesting to note that even a society like Japan has it's stupid poor just like here in the USA. Low income? Check. Gambling habit? Check. There is probably more there if one had time to find it. There is a reason this guy is poor, though Japan does have a homeless population of mostly men of course.
It is not impossible that our gambling buddy has been using the gambling excuse to launder the money with the assistance of some yakuza.
He gambled some of it as an excuse to hide the rest...
I suspect that like a lot of people, he was looking to get one big hit and be able to repay the money and have a big stash left. Not understanding that it was a pipe dream.
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