FRAUD BUSTED IN TOKYO
Six people have been arrested in a suspected money laundering case involving illegally receiving a total of about 570 million yen wired from a U.S. bank to Japan by disguising proceeds of crime as legitimate income, Japanese police said Thursday.
The suspects are Nyeche Obeneme, a 36-year-old company executive with Nigerian citizenship in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, two other Nigerian men, a Ghanaian man and a Japanese man and woman.
The case is believed to be part of roughly 2.8 billion yen wired to seven countries, such as Japan, South Korea, China and Australia, from a Citibank account in New York in the name of the National Bank of Ethiopia in the autumn of 2008, investigative sources said.
The billions of yen were wired based on fake wire transfer documents sent to the U.S. bank. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Japan’s National Police Agency in October 2008 to also investigate the case in Japan.
Most of the approximately 570 million yen sent to Japan has already been withdrawn, and it is unclear what has become of the money, according to the sources.
Some of the suspects have said they allowed their bank accounts to be used for receiving remittances and got commissions ranging from 3 million to 7 million yen, police said.
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