URA HELLO WORK c.15- con man!
What is Shinya Kusaka’s URA HELLO WORK?
Where can I buy it?
15 – CON MAN (詐欺師：SAGISHI)
RISK: ***
SALARY:***
HARD LABOR:***
ILLEGALITY:****
You might think that con-men are just an urban legend. But there’s a surprisingly large number of people with the the right combination of gift-of-gab, skill, and innovation who can earn a living at it. After all, there’s so many different cons, there’s room for everyone in this field!
This time, the interviewee is Mr.Paddytown, who was my senpai (先輩：an upper-classman) in high school. He started his life of crime by breaking into vending machines with a crowbar, and selling the candy to elementary-school students. Rumor had it he also had a steel chain for a weapon! He seems like a smart guy, although not one for book-study. When he was out of his teen years, he started conning people just as a lark, and has been walking down that road ever since.
PICKLES WERE HOW I GOT MY START!
“I started sagi (詐欺：fraud, but the literal translation is ‘manufacture of deceit’) just as a joke, but I was pretty good at it, and it was amusing work, so I just kept doing it! Anyway, I hate the taste of pickles. So when I order a hamburger I always say ‘hold the pickles.’ One day me and my friend were at (REDACTED)burger, and the girl taking our order was such a bitch! Like customers were a nuisance, like we weren’t good enough for her fast food! I asked for no pickles. And when opened up my hamburger, there were the pickles right in my face. I said, ‘Ok, we got to fuck with these people back!’”
So my senpai grabbed his stomach, and fell to the floor screaming in pain. His friend started shouting “Are you allright? Are you allright?” just in case the other patrons had missed the point. Everyone was staring! The workers rushed over in a tizzy.
“My friend started yelling at them, really scary-style. ‘Why did you put pickles in it? He’s allergic to pickles! He could die now! He asked for no pickles, but you killed him! This is absolutely your fault!’ The snobby register girl came back and apologized over and over. I figured that if I over-did it, they’d call an ambulance and my sham would be exposed. So I faked getting a little better, enough to sit down in a chair at least. At last, the manager called us into the back, and tried to patch things up by offering us some free meal cupons. I figured that this scam had a little more mileage in it, so I turned him down: ‘What good will free cupons go? I’m never coming to this harmful restaurant again!’ And then he took out his own wallet and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills and gave them to me! Fuck yeah! Afterwards, me and my friend split the take, and that’s how I got started doing sagi: We were both out of work at the time, so we figured we’d take our show all over town. But nobody else would do us the favor of forgetting to hold the pickles!!! So we started looking around for a different scam. We kept bouncing ideas off of each other until we hit upon a winner.
“Con-men are like TV magicians – you need a good gimmick! I used to think that con-men were really smart guys, but then I realized how many of them are just copy-catting some crime they read about in the daily news. It seems like the more newspapers publish crime stories, the more they are encouraging it!”
SELLING THE FAKE BALDNESS CURE
“We came up with a good idea – didn’t make a huge amount of money but it was pretty safe, and plus it required almost no start-up money. I can talk about how we did it, because we ain’t doing it any more! But seems like you still could do it if you wanted, know what I mean? I’m talking about selling fake medicine to ‘stop the spread of thinning hair.’”
He was certainly on to something: thinning hair is a huge fear of every guy in his ‘30s, whether he’s bald or just afraid he’s GOING to go bald. They bought ‘legitimate’ anti-thinning cream over the counter, but then cut it with 90% water. (ed. note: ‘legitimate’ anti-baldness cream? The irony!) Then they took out classified ads in the evening papers and sports magazines: ‘The ultimate weapon against premature baldness and thinning hair ! Now and only now one bottle for $48!!” and the return address. Even with such a brief, perfunctory ad, they were immediately flooded with requests.
“We sold a lot of that stuff! Water it down, re-package it in our own bottles! It cost us a dollar a bottle, we sold it for $48 a bottle – about 100 orders a damn month! I was surprised there were so many desperate guys out there. What’s more, there were repeat customers! They’d write us these polite letters, saying that it cured them, thanking us, all this nice stuff! Oh, how we laughed!
“As a supplement to the existing ‘medicine,’ we developed a ‘special DX version’ which sold for $88! Then we sent out junk-mail ads to all the customers on our mailing list. About one in ten actually wrote back! Idiots! DX was basically the same as regular but instead of 10% actual medicine it was 20%! We got one or two letters saying that the package was leaking, but other than that, no complaints, if you can believe it.”
YOU CAN’T COMPLAIN IF YOU ARE DECIEVED BY THE SAGISHI
If you want to be a successful sagishi, you need to have one of two things: either a scam where it’s hard for people to tell if they’ve been ripped off, or a scam where they’ll get in trouble themselves if they complain to the police. An example of the former type is our baldness cure – even the results of the legitimate, un-cut variety vary widely from person to person, so it’s hard for our ‘customers’ to decide if it’s bogus or if maybe they’re just unlucky.
“The latter type of scam, well I’ll tell you that right now:
“Some guys who say to themselves, ‘Hey, I want to be a sagishi. That is the life for me!’ They think they need tobashi keitai (飛ばし携帯： cell-phones obtained under a fake name, which can not be traced back to the real owner) or kakuu kouza (架空口座：secret bank accounts). Sounds handy, right? I mean, I have those things, but I know a professional forger who can hook me up. But for someone who is just starting out as a sagishi, where can he turn? Well, he might find one of OUR ads on the internet or in the back of a true-crime magazine. WE’LL sell him that stuff. It costs around 3 to 4 hundred. If we price it any cheaper, the mark will tip that it’s fake. Naturally, we just take the money and run! This scam is overdone nowadays, so we don’t do it any longer. But even if you did it now, it’s not risky - What’s the mark going to do? Go to the police?: ‘Officer, I sent away for this stolen cell-phone and fake papers to go with it, but it never arrived! Please help me!’
“In the case of the kakuu kouza scam, you can get even more evil with it if you want. I mean, you can actually go ahead and set up a real kakuu kouza for them. Then when it gets pretty full of their money, you go ahead and withdraw it all. See ya! The problem is the chances of your getting arrested go up, so we don’t mess with that scam! Here’s how it works: when you set up the account in the mark’s (fake) name, you go ahead and name yourself as a proxy on the bank forms. That way not only can you take money out, but you can go to any ATM and check the amount – see if it’s full enough. If you wait too long, the mark might withdraw it himself! Sure, the risk is higher than other forms of sagi, but what are you gonna do? Just get the money fast, and split.
“These amateurs shouldn’t even try to be sagishi in the first place. What do they think they’re doing with tobashi keitai and kakuu kouza?? It’s hard to feel sorry for them. Some of these marks get clever and they’ll deposit a little bit of money, so they can check to see if it ‘disappears.’ But we’re not after a measly one or two hundred! So naturally we let the money alone, and then the mark gets down to his real ‘business’ and the money really starts coming in. A friend of mine who was selling illegal pornos, he paid some guy to set him up a kakuu kouza. He got took for $10,000! Because of that, he decided to give up his business and go back to his day job.”
My senpai seems to really enjoy his work. Sagishi seem to think of themselves as smart guys who are playing a really risky game.
RECENTLY THE BIG SCAM IS ‘ARRANGED BANKRUPTCIES’
Next, my friend told me about the ‘business’ that could put food on his table for years to come: keikaku jiko hasan (計画自己破産: arranged bankruptcies)
(ed. note: Japan’s bankruptcy system is just like in the USA: you are allowed to default on debts and declare bankruptcy, but it’s illegal to deliberately run up as many debts as you can, with the intention of ripping off your creditors. And you have to go to court to declare bankruptcy so the judge can try to decide if you’re ‘legit’ or not. If the judge thinks you’re a fraud, he or she won’t let you declare bankruptcy and you still have to pay everyone their money back. So, onward!).
So far, he has only had three clients, but he says that all of them have succeeded in being allowed to declare jiko hasan. He is only giving ‘advice’ on how to convince the judge, not actually forcing them. Furthermore, he never reveals his identity. Because of these two factors, he says his risk of getting caught is very low. He adds that the amount of keikaku jiko hasan is only going to increase in the years to come:
“Do you know how many people declare jiko hasan every year in Japan? 200,000! Because of the recession, I suppose, but still – it’s an outrageous figure! And out of those, who knows how many are kaikaku (arranged)?
“I have an acquaintance who is a yamikin (やみ金：loan-shark). If people owe so much money they can’t pay him back, he refers them to me, for my ‘advice.’ Normally people don’t owe yamikin so much that they have to keikaku jiko hasan, or so I thought! Silly me. $20, $30,000 loans? Yikes! From the point of view of the yamikin, a mark who owes that much might just flip out and kill himself, and then how does the Mr. yamikin get paid? That’s where I come in!
A debtor with multiple creditors. . . well, he’s got to pay back MY friend first! After that, he can go ahead and go bankrupt, screw everyone else. Many people don’t want to keikaku jiko hasan, because they’ll get black-listed – their credit rating is ruined forever. But where else are they going to get the money?
“First of all, I ‘advise’ them to max out their credit cards. Take out the limit, every day. If it’s a ‘cash-machine card’ with a $2000-a-day limit, that’s only ten days it’ll take to pay back a $20,000 loan. If the card is a ‘shopping’ card, I’ll take the mark shopping for items which have a high re-sale value: new-model computers and such. You can get around $10,000 at the pawn shop before you max out a credit card like that. The biggest debtor I worked with owed $50,000! It took us around 3 months for him to ‘get him ready’ to keikaku jiko hasan: that’s how long it took him to borrow 5 large with his cards!
“When it comes to jiko hasan, people are less stressed once they finally decide to take the plunge. Here’s how to convince the judge: start out by paying a little interest, and then gradually stop paying altogether. The toritate gyousha (取り立て業者: debt collectors) will come and hound you but you have to tough it out. After a year of this, you’re finally ready to go to court. It’s just a matter of filing some papers. The actual process of filing for jiko hasan is – while painful – much simpler than I’d expected. It does help if you’ve been paying the interest on your credit-cards, though. That, plus telling the judge you really honestly want to pay the money back someday!
“In the following months, you’ll have to go back to the court-house a few times, but that’s just to check that you really can’t pay back the money. Just say, ‘I can’t pay it’!’ Bada-bing. The only people who get turned down by the judge are guys – gamblers, mostly – who declare bankruptcy over and over again. And even some of those guys manage to convince the judge that they have ‘gambler’s disease’ and they’re not responsible for their actions!!
“About six months after you declare jiko hasan, the judge decides whether to indeminify you or not. This is a more strict process in which they try to figure out if your bankruptcy was staged for financial gain, or if it was legitimate. This is the part where I really earn my money, by helping clients to hide their assets, conceal their money, and invest in high-price purchases which can then be physically hidden. So, I can’t tell you all the tips and tricks that I use. That part is hard enough to begin with!”
In Japan, personal bankruptcy means that you can’t have a credit card or bank account for five years, and you can’t declare bankruptcy again for another ten years. That’s it.
Mr. Paddytown has been making a living as a con man for a number of years, and doesn’t know what else he can do.
“You get ‘troubles’ in my line. Late night threatening calls from guys who sound like Yakuza. I guess they’re my clients’ other creditors! Right now I’m confident that I can manage those clowns, but every year I get older, so . . .I can’t do this forever! More and more I’m thinking about when to quit.”
I hope he can quit, too!
No comments
No comments yet. Be the first.
Leave a reply