Japan arrests Vietnamese for swindling $35,000 in cyber fraud

Tran Viet Anh, 29, was arrested over allegations of remote controlling an online bank account and illegally transferring money into his own account, police of Aichi Prefecture said on Wednesday, according to Japanese media.

Anh and his accomplices were accused of instructing a 69-year-old man to install a program that would allow his computer to be remote-controlled back in September 2022, Japanese authorities said.

He then remote-controlled the computer, signed into the victim’s bank account and transferred ¥5 million into another account. This money was later converted into cryptocurrency, before Anh finally accessed the money.

The suspect denied the accusations, saying he was not the one who transferred the money. But police of Aichi Prefecture said Anh was the mastermind in over 2,500 cases of online fraud, swindling ¥1.24 billion from his victims.

Around 433,000 Vietnamese live in Japan, accounting for 15.7% of the expat population in the country, according to the county’s immigration bureau.