Police on Tuesday arrested eight Japanese nationals on an airplane after they were deported from the Philippines, for their alleged involvement in telecom fraud that targeted people in Japan.
The suspects, aged 25 to 35, allegedly engaged in telecom fraud and extortion of elderly people in Japan for at least three years, according to the Philippines immigration bureau. Local authorities seized a number of devices and manuals on how to commit fraud from a resort hotel they used as an office.
The Japanese police arrested them for allegedly calling a woman in her 70s in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, in 2020 and falsely claiming she owed them an unpaid service fee.
They arrived at Narita airport near Tokyo on Tuesday afternoon from Manila.
The suspects were apprehended in 2020 in Laguna province in the south of Manila on suspicion of illegally working in the Philippines.
They were held at the same detention facility as senior members of the "Luffy" crime ring, according to the immigration bureau. The group allegedly coordinated burglaries in Japan in recent years remotely via an encrypted messaging app while being held at the facility.
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