Female scammers pose as sex workers, terrorize men in Kabukicho

The tabloid Weekly Friday has reported on two scammers who are terrorizing unsuspecting men they pick up through dating and matchmaking apps.

The first is dubbed Glans Dash Yuri.

Yuri apparently agrees to meet guys on an app for compensated dating. She sets the fee as ¥20,000 and they meet somewhere like outside a fast food restaurant near Seibu Shinjuku Station, which is a short walk to the love hotels in Okubo-Kabukicho.

They go to a really basic love hotel with a small room, bed, and shower (these may not even be in a love hotel but just a “rental room” in a multi-tenant building). She demands her payment.

Then she gets to work, so to speak. The guy takes his pants off and she gives the tip of his penis a bit of a lick, before quickly making a dash for it, leaving the guy with his pants down and cock out, unable to chase after his money.

Friday even managed to witness Yuri entering a cheap love hotel, about to leave a middle-aged victim in the lurch. She is usually spotted in a mask and black hat.

The second scammer is nicknamed Fleet-Footed Lyra, who employs a similar technique as Yuri but is known for being even faster.

If you hang around the love hotels of Shinjuku, you may spot her racing out of a cheaper establishment, clutching her unearned cash as she runs.

This video of a daytime walk past Okubo Park just happened to capture the moment a masked Lyra dashes from a hotel. She is indeed a fast runner.

Like the once-ubiquitous deai “encounter” websites before them, dating apps are a bit of a minefield, with scammers lurking in search of easy victims (typically, men looking to find woman who profess to want casual sex). If she seems too good to be true, she probably is!

The popularity of papakatsu has also proved that compensated dating was not a 1990s and 2000s thing, but has simply morphed and earned a new name. Some of the young women offering papakatsu to older guys are just trying to scam them — or even murder them.

And in the current times, when streetwalkers have become so rampant in the Kabukicho-Okubo area of Shinjuku that the phenomenon has become a tourist attraction, it is inevitable some women are going to take advantage of unsuspecting men.