An elderly woman in Tokyo has been scammed out of 97 million yen, or about $744,000, worth of cryptocurrency after receiving a fraudulent phone call warning her that her bank account was being used to commit a crime.
Tokyo police say a woman in her 80s living in the Setagaya district received phone calls from someone posing as a district office official and another as a police officer in November.
The callers reportedly told her that her account was being used for a crime and that she was also implicated.
Police say they also received phone calls from someone claiming to be a Financial Services Agency official and another claiming to be a lawyer. She was urged to transfer her money to another account as it would be frozen.
Following his instructions, the woman opened an account for cryptocurrency transactions and bought digital currency worth approximately $744,000. She registered a password that the people she called had specified.
He later received a phone call from a cryptocurrency exchange about his huge transaction and soon after realized that almost all of the money in his account had been withdrawn.
Tokyo police have been investigating the case as fraud.
