The Philippine Bureau of Immigration (BI) put nine Japanese nationals on a Japan Airlines flight to Narita on Monday morning, 24 February 2020, after Manila concluded they had been running a phone-scam boiler room that had extracted roughly 1.5 billion yen ($13 million) from at least 1,500 victims in Japan since 2018. The deportees, Irie Dai, Ishii Kyogo, Hamaoka Kantaro, Maeyama Takuto, Tanaka Kazuya, Yoshida Takeshi, Murata Seiichi, Kouki Shouji and Imizumi Ryo, were arrested in November 2019 and held while Tokyo Metropolitan Police built fraud cases against them. Commissioner Jaime Morente said the nine are only the first batch of 36 Japanese suspects his fugitive-search unit rounded up in coordinated raids across Metro Manila and Cebu.
The fraud ring and its Philippine base
Tokyo police told Japanese reporters that the group specialised in “ore-ore” scams: callers posing as distressed relatives or bank officials trick elderly victims into wiring cash to designated accounts. Investigators traced the voice-phishing calls to internet-based phone lines registered in the Philippines but routed through servers in China and South Korea to mask the trail. The ring allegedly moved operatives in and out of the country on tourist visas, rotating them every few months to keep Japanese authorities guessing.
BI intelligence officer Melvin Mabulac said the suspects rented upscale condominiums in Taguig and Cebu City, fitting them out with multiple VoIP routers, autodial software and scripts written in Japanese. “They worked in shifts, targeting pensioners during daytime in Japan,” Mabulac told local radio. Court documents filed in Manila show each operator was expected to bring in at least 10 million yen a month; failure drew fines deducted from already meagre salaries, a tactic common in organised cyber-fraud.
Arrest and immigration charges
Agents from the BI’s Fugitive Search Unit arrested the 36 Japanese nationals during dawn raids on 26 November 2019. Officers found 32 laptops, 174 mobile phones and 55 SIM boxes capable of blasting thousands of calls an hour. Because the suspects had no work permits, prosecutors charged them with violating the Philippine Immigration Act for “engaging in gainful activity while on temporary visitor visas,” a deportable offence that short-circuits lengthy extradition hearings.
Commissioner Morente said Manila opted for immigration charges rather than criminal fraud prosecution to “remove these predators quickly.” The nine flown out on Monday lost their final appeal before the Board of Commissioners on 14 February. They were fingerprinted, photographed and placed on the BI’s blacklist, barring re-entry. “We will not allow the Philippines to become a haven for cyber-criminals who prey on other countries,” Morente said in a statement released at Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
Tokyo’s long-running investigation
Japanese authorities have chased the syndicate since 2018, when complaints from victims in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka surged. Detective Hiroshi Sakurai of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police fraud division told NHK that investigators first noticed the Philippine link after tracking money laundered through remittance centres in Cebu. “We shared intelligence with the BI and the Anti-Cybercrime Group almost weekly,” Sakurai said. Japanese courts have already issued arrest warrants for all 36 suspects on charges of organised fraud; the nine deported on Monday were handed directly to waiting detectives at Narita.
Prosecutors in Tokyo estimate the group’s total take at 1.5 billion yen, but Sakurai believes the real figure could be double. Victims range from a 78-year-old widow in Yokohama who wired 8 million yen for a fake hospital bill to a company executive in Sapporo who transferred 45 million yen to secure a non-existent business loan. Japanese law allows courts to seize assets bought with illicit proceeds; police have frozen five condominiums in Manila and two vehicles registered to dummy corporations linked to the suspects.
Remaining suspects and wider crackdown
Twenty-seven Japanese nationals from the same sweep remain in BI detention centres in Bicutan and Cebu. Officials say their deportation papers are “in various stages of review,” with at least six cases awaiting resolution of passport discrepancies and age-verification requests from Tokyo. Immigration lawyers warn that some suspects may challenge deportation by claiming they were merely employees, not organisers.
The November raids coincided with arrests of 68 Chinese and 23 Taiwanese nationals in similar call-centre scams targeting mainland Chinese, signalling a broader government effort to dismantle foreign cyber-crime operations ahead of Manila’s hosting of the ASEAN summit later this year. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has ordered the BI and the Philippine National Police to create a permanent task force against transnational cyber-fraud, citing “the country’s reputation and the safety of legitimate offshore gaming workers.”
Monday’s expulsion delivers to Tokyo the first instalment of a fraud syndicate that turned Philippine condos into hunting grounds for Japanese pensioners. With millions in losses still unaccounted for and more than two dozen suspects awaiting their own flights, investigators on both sides expect months of additional indictments as prosecutors follow the money through shell firms and crypto-wallets traced back to the same Manila-based crew.
