A 38-year-old Japanese man was arrested on suspicion of fraud after exploiting a food delivery app’s loophole to unlawfully receive over 1,000 deliveries without paying for them.
For more than two years, Takuya Higashimoto, an unemployed man from Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, took advantage of the order cancellation policy of a major Japanese food delivery platform to eat over 1,000 free meals. To do this without being detected was no easy feat. Investigators found that the fraudster used 124 accounts on the Demae-can delivery app, many of them registered under false names and fake addresses. Higashimoto typically used prepaid cards to register an account and cancelled his membership a few days later. This made it very hard for the platform to detect and stop his operation, which resulted in losses exceeding 3.7 million yen ($24,000).
According to Japanese news media, the 38-year-old man placed orders on the Demae-can app and selected contactless delivery. After the food arrived, he falsely claimed that he had never received the order and received a refund. For example, on July 30, Higashimoto created a new account on the delivery app Demae-can under a fake name and address and managed to receive a refund of 16,000 yen ($105) after claiming that the ice cream, bentos, and chicken steaks had not been delivered.
“At first, I just tried this trick. I couldn’t stop after reaping the rewards of my fraud,” Higashimoto told police after his capture, earlier this month.
Demae
The Japanese fraudster, who had been unemployed for several years, was finally apprehended earlier this month and officially accused of fraud. His two years of free meals inspired Demae-can to implement an alert system to detect abnormal trading activities and prevent similar scams in the future.
