A cop who repeatedly attempted to blackmail a woman he questioned for “suspicious” behaviour so he could pay off his huge social gaming debt has actually been jailed and fired.
The 44-year-old police sergeant in the employ of Hyogo prefecture was sacked and handed an 18 month prison sentence after his blackmail antics came to light.
According to the charges, the officer was on patrol when he happened upon a car parked in a quiet street.
On the pretext that the vehicle was “suspicious,” he proceeded to demand the female occupant present her license and tell him her address.
Although so far this differed little from more routine acts of police oppression, the next day he hatched upon the scheme of blackmailing her to pay for his social gaming debts, lying to his girlfriend and telling her he was “going to work” but instead heading to the woman’s address.
At first he lost his nerve and returned home, but some days later he gathered all his lawmanly courage and went to her house to extort money from her with the curious ruse of asking her if she “would buy the recording of me questioning her.”
Amazingly, he left this as a written demand on her car windscreen.
His victim became concerned and eventually reported the matter to police, whose tireless investigations soon uncovered the culprit despite his being astute enough not to reveal his name on the blackmail demand.
He was arrested for attempted extortion, and a further two demands he was in the process of preparing to inflict on her were uncovered.
He complained that he was “an old-school cop who couldn’t adapt to the new ways of doing things” and that social gaming was his only escape from the gruelling business of Japanese policing.
The 500,000 yen in charges he accrued playing Shingeki no Bahamut and other social games was said to have been the final straw.
Despite all this he has still launched an appeal against his sentence.
Combining police criminality and the wonders of social gaming has led to an acerbic reaction online:
“How did he manage to waste 500,000 on that!”
“What kind of retard spends 500,000 on that trash.”
“He pretty much ruined his life for that 500k too.”
“Those games aren’t even fun, let alone worth spending that kind of money on.”
“At 44 he was doing this…”
“Another fine example of the public yakuza.”
“Cops get into social games a lot, they spend most of their time waiting around doing nothing after all.”
“Buy manga if you want to see pretty pictures appear in front of you like that.”
“Just ban these games already.”
“Doesn’t sound like the first time he’s done something like this from the account given.”
“18 months with no suspended sentence is actually pretty heavy.”
“How could you spend that much on this, and when you have no money to pay for it too…”
“Stick to monthly subscriptions at least!”
TBH, spending 500k yen on RoB is norm…that game is too darn expensive to manage…if you start opening card pack…your credit card will start killing you
Who cares bout some charge look at DAT BUTT.
How in the hell does one run up 500k yen in charges on a game that’s equivalent to $5,000 USD.
You’d be hard pressed to even do that in WoW and similar.
Might be possible with Skylanders if you buy every last character.
Still why did he try and get the money from one person?
If he was smart he could have handed out fake traffic or parking tickets and got it off several people 10K yen at a time saying you can pay the ticket right her right now.
Maybe buy a car boot off ebay or something for the scheme.
These games are designed using the psychology of addiction and advertised with spam. Bahamut et al exist solely to take advantage of weak minded people, kids, etc- they should be illegal full stop.
Kinda reminds me of how Gaiaonline operates. You pour money onto their gaming site and if you encounter a glitchy-problem they steal from you. They make money off of you enough to wrongfully ban you.