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AFP

In Japan, armies of criminals recruited online for “shadow jobs”

Risa Yamada felt useless, struggling to find stable, rewarding work. Until she was lured by one of the growing number of job offers posted by Japanese criminal gangs on social media. Hired to pose as a police officer in telephone scams in Japan, she found a form of fulfillment in this role, taking advantage of the solitude or naivety of elderly people to extract from them the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of euros.”For the first time in my life, I was told that I was good at something (…) This work gave me the impression that I was needed,” this 27-year-old young woman confided in July during her trial in Tokyo, after which she was sentenced to three years in prison. Like her, many criminals are recruited on online platforms like works to carry out “shadow jobs” (“yami baito” in Japanese). In 2022, damages linked to organized fraud recorded in Japan jumped by 30% over one year to 37 billion yen (230 million of euros), according to the national police agency. Shady job offers have existed in the country for a long time, but they were once distributed through advertisements in magazines or stickers in public toilets. With the advent of social networks, criminal gangs only have to “sip their coffee in an air-conditioned room and use their phone to round up a group of burglars”, while enjoying anonymity, according to criminal sociologist Noboru Hirosue, interviewed by AFP. – Like “in a video game” -A 57-year-old man who was responsible for transporting packages of illicit money to station lockers in Tokyo remembers the “invisibility” of his employer, who contacted him via encrypted Telegram messaging. “It’s like you were in a video game, where you receive orders, complete missions and get rewards,” this former detainee told AFP on condition of anonymity. , now retrained in the hotel industry. After each “mission”, a message with emojis thanked him for his work and told him where his pay was hidden. “You don’t even feel guilty because you don’t see anyone,” he explains. The police are struggling to combat the phenomenon, even offering rewards of one million yen (6,200 euros) in exchange for information on the gangs hidden behind these ads. Lured by easy money, those who respond are sometimes very young, like this 16-year-old high school student arrested in Tokyo this summer after posing as a bank employee to defraud an octogenarian. A 90-year-old woman also died in January after being tied up and beaten at her home by several burglars recruited online. The perpetrators of the attack, which shocked the archipelago and really made the police aware of the phenomenon “yami baito”, were Japanese criminals established in the Philippines, who had set up teams of criminals via Telegram for a series of burglaries and scams in Japan. – Recruits exploited then thrown away – Requested by AFP, Telegram claimed to “actively” monitor the public spaces of its platform, specifying that users could also report private groups. The social network said he wanted to earn “money so I could let off some steam.” “I only thought about being able to get drunk again by drinking overpriced champagne in hostess bars,” added the man who said he thus collected nearly ten million yen (62,000 euros) in a few months. Interviewed by AFP in temporary housing for former prisoners in Tokyo, he said he had served a two-year prison sentence. Gang leaders are rarely worried : only 2% of the 13,100 people arrested for organized fraud between 2018 and 2022 held positions of responsibility, according to Japanese police statistics. They “exploit and throw away” their recruits “like pawns”, underlines the police interviewed by the AFP. Many of them are forced to disclose personal information to their superiors, in case they try to escape their control. Risa Yamada thus discovered how things could get out of hand when she was forced to go to the Philippines in 2019, then locked in a hotel room under close surveillance, fearing for her life. She thinks another recruit was murdered. When she was arrested by the police, she remembers, “I said to myself: ‘I’m finally going to be free’.”tmo/stu/mac/etb/tmt/ jnd