Eight people in southern Japan forked over ¥150 million (US$1.27 million) to a man who promised huge returns involving fake US$1 million bills and then disappeared with their money, a news report said yesterday.
The US Treasury does not make US$1 million bills.
The eight, including three who have filed for personal bankruptcy because of the huge outlays involved in the scam, are considering filing a criminal complaint with police, the national daily Asahi Shimbun said.
Police in Kumamoto, 900km southwest of Tokyo, could not immediately comment on the report.
The unidentified investors first heard of the US$1 million note from a 52-year-old construction material company president in early 2003, according to Asahi, citing several investors.
Big money
The president told them about a ``rare'' US$1 million bill that was for sale in Chengdu, China, and invited them to pool money to buy several such notes promising a return 10 times of their investment, the report said.
The investors were told that the US government printed the bills in 1928 to allow Americans in China to bring their assets back home, Asahi said.
The president showed them a thousand of the US$1 million notes featuring a portrait of George Washington at a Tokyo hotel, according to Asahi.
The investors were told the notes could be exchanged for smaller denominations in Hong Kong, but no exchange ever took place, it reported.
"We continued to fork over our money because we were promised, `You'll get several hundreds of millions of yen in three days,' or `You'll get that amount in a week,''' one investor was quoted as saying.
By last March, the eight had handed over a total of ¥150 million, but the company president said that the bills would be exchanged by the end of April and he disappeared, according to the report.
The largest US denomination ever produced was US$100,000 between 1934 and 1935, according to the Treasury.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS