Cop blackmails woman to pay for mobile phone game debt

Mobile phone games can be addictive. One cop found this out to his cost.

The 44-year-old Takahiro Ueyama from Hyogo has just got an 18-month sentence for using his position to keep up with his mobile phone game debt, which had apparently reached as high as ¥500,000 ($5,000). That is some addiction!

What was the game? An ero game? No, much more mainstream: Rage of Bahamut (Shingeki No Bahamuto). But it seems Ueyama couldn’t stop playing.

When he got a particularly large phone bill he drove over to the home of a woman he had stopped the previous month for “suspicious behavior” in her car. He left a note offering to sell her a recording of a conversation between her and the police.

She didn’t respond, though, and when Ueyama was contemplating further clever ways to shake her down, he found his colleagues had traced the note back to him. Fail!

The woman had been parked in her car when Ueyama originally questioned her in June. Her crime? She was parked on a road where there were few people. Likely she was doing nothing at all — we can entertain fantasies that it was something sexual?! — but cops in Japan love to stop random people and ask for their ID and address. All part of their quest to impose total surveillance over society. And now we know why they do it!

There are bent cops everywhere in the world but perhaps only in Japan are the cops getting side payments not for hookers, drugs or other freebies — but for mobile games!

Perhaps also in Japan are the cops so out of touch with reality that Ueyama has the balls to launch an appeal.

So if you get caught with your pants down by the cops, be careful! Even if they don’t arrest you for breaking the law, they may find ways later to exhort money from you.