We've written before about the problem of scams in the Japanese "dating site" industry, where customers think they are interacting with real women who want to meet them but are actually exchanging messages with someone (perhaps even a man) who is trying to ensure they keep paying the membership fees for as long as possible.
In a recent article on Japan Today, someone apparently interviewed two such scammers.
The first is actually just someone who worked as a cheap hostess bar. We don't think this qualifies, since though it is possible for a customer to take a hostess out on a date, it's not ...
If you think something is too good to be true, you're probably right.
That's our advice, which should have been followed by the thousands of men who thought they had the chance to go on a date with Atsuko Maeda.
A 38-year-old man was arrested earlier this month for operating a deai-kei dating website that claimed to offer dates with the former AKB48 idol.
He had fled the country but foolishly returned in late September.
Maeda is now a mainstream actress and cannot even be "met" at the famous AKB48 handshaking events. But that didn't seemed to occur to the 370,000 people who paid ...
We've long been talking about the apparent imminent demise of fake deai-kei ("encounter") websites, which promise liaisons with members of the opposite sex but seem mostly just to take your money.
There seem to be new cases of fake sites appearing in the news every few weeks. Surely, with such bad publicity, people will just stop signing up to the services soon?
Another example of the dangers has been revealed in the case of the Chiba company managing a members-only deai-kei site with men pretending to be women.
The site had 2.7 million members nationwide, of whom only one was ...
We've long blogged about the fake profiles on deai-kei (encounter) sites. The police have been cracking down on them in recent years, as we reported before.
We heard about this story about a pretty shocking and egregious recent example.
Chiba police have arrested eight people of a deai-kei site company on suspicion of hiring male employees to pose as women on the site and extort male users of their money.
The scam sites apparently had a total of 2.7 million members — and all but one of them were men! The sites employed male part-time workers to chat with the members, who ...
Four men have been arrested in Tokyo for theft by Kanagawa police after they blackmailed a man they met through a smartphone deai-kei app.
Deai-kei refers to the portals online and off where men go to meet girls for sex. It is somewhere between adultery and prostitution, but the variables are huge. You might be talking to a few men posing as teenagers or you might be arranging to meet a genuine girl who wants some cash for a new handbag.
The four men were in their teens and twenties. They apparently scouted a thirty-year-old man from Fujisawa City via the app and invited him to the mean ...
Life is short. Have an affair.
So says the slogan Ashley Madison, the infamous social media for adultery, which has 1.8 million unique users.
It started in Canada in 2001 and now has finally come to Japan.
It works by users purchasing credits, which they can use to send mails to potential partners, so in some ways on the surface is not dissimilar to regular dating sites. But this is totally up-front that the people using the site are cheating on their real partners.
Women can join for free (yay!) and there is a translation tool if you're interested in looking for a foreign ...
The days of deai-kei websites are looking numbered as high-profile cases of arrests and suing continue.
Deai-kei sites are ostensibly dating sites, though many are actually run all by men, who pose as women -- sometimes as idols -- in order to extract fees over long periods of time.
Police arrested the thirty-four-year-old executive of a deai-kei company earlier this month, along with the nine part-time men and women who worked there -- no doubt as the "voice" of the women deceiving the men by email. The company, Wingnet, has sales in excess of 10 billion yen. An arrest warrant has ...
A man has been arrested for running an online dating (deai-kei) scam that scammed 2,100 otaku out of 210 million yen over the years.
Deai-kei websites are common portals in Japan, usually a ruse for informal prostitution or enjo kosai. In this case, the owner tricked members into thinking they would be able to exchange emails with their favorite AKB48 idols and even go on dates with the girls.
The trial has begun of the 32-year-old man from Chiba who ran the site. He would have his part-time employees send mails to the otaku posing as celebrities and idols. After a time, these mails ...
Be careful of online dating.
That's the lesson to be learnt here after police busted DEAiBBS, a Japanese dating site started in 2005 and which has been "creative" with its user profiles for years.
Apparently it was helping 120,000 lonely Japanese singles hook up -- but actually some 80% of the users weren't even real, it seems.
Some unfortunate victims spent small fortunes pursuing the site as a path to romance. One 70-year old man used 10 million yen (more than $100,000); a 30-year old woman wasted 20 million (over $200,000) yen!
A simple Google search brings up lots of ...
A man has been arrested for pimping out teenaged girls via a deai-kei internet website. So-called deai-kei sites ("encounter" websites) are portals for meeting up with young ladies, often platforms for enjo kosai (dates with cash rewards) or open prostitution.
This time one man was calling the shots and had several underage girls on the site working for him. Atsuo Yoshinari (27) was a former host living in Shinjuku who, along with his two fellow arrested chums, admits the charges of prostituting a 17-year old girl. The fatal incident came in a love hotel in north Tokyo in June where the ...
