AKB48 and the Kansai credit card scammers: Six face prosecution

If you’re a AKB48 fan, you are probably a vulnerable individual with money to burn and an appetite for over-priced merchandise.

And if you know someone like that or come into contact with them — be warned. They may just steal your money.

As we know, otaku fans idol groups are famously willing to put themselves into serious debt in order to purchase thousands of CDs.

But this is taking things to almost mafia levels.

Kyoto police are now set to prosecute six men, all aged 20, who stole information from other people’s credit cards so that they could buy nearly 500 CDs by the group AKB48.

According to media reports, they took the credit card numbers of customers at the place where they worked so that they could buy online 486 CDs, racking up a total of 486,000 yen in two months.

Five of the six are all sophomore students at colleges in Kansai, including the prestigious Doshisha University.

From April to May 2013 they stole numbers from their customers at their part-time job.

They were cunning, though, having the CDs sent to a post office and using fake health insurance cards as ID to pick them up. You have to hand it to them; they should have been doing far more serious crimes with this amount of stealth and planning.

But why?! Why so many CDs?!

Well, they include tickets to the hand-shaking events in which you can “meet” you favorite AKB48 member for a few seconds. The “music” was worthless to the men; they ended up in the garbage.

The leader of the group was a student from Osaka Sangyo University and he used some tickets to go to the events and meet AKB48. He went on four such occasions, managing through accumulating the tickets to spend 81 minutes with the idols. We’re sure they were very glad to see the back of him.

Wait. It gets better. The gang of six sold the rest of the tickets so that fans could meet their idols or vote for them in the “elections”. Police said their online sales pocketed the men around 400,000 yen, which isn’t bad thinking.