NPA does 1st profile on ATM con men

He is a young, urban male living with his parents or spouse and--police have found--frequently a first-offender motivated by greed alone to try his hand at crime.

Such is the sketch that has emerged of the typical culprit in ATM fraud scams targeting the elderly. In the most common scheme for such frauds, the opportunist poses as a family member in need of cash to dupe his elderly victim into making a cash transfer.

By assessing the cases of 297 out of 568 people arrested over the scams between January 2007 and April 2008, the National Police Agency was able to build a criminal profile from common results in 11 categories, including age, address and motive.

The profiling study, the first of its kind by the NPA, was limited to people arrested on suspicion of fraud, attempted fraud, extortion or attempted extortion, and only included offenders who acknowledged the criminality of their acts.

Suspects in their 20s and 30s made up 187 and 62 of the cases respectively--or about 80 percent together; 275 of the suspects, or more than 90 percent, were men.

In 164 cases--more than half--the offenders had family registers in the Kanto region, while 201 were living in the region at the time.

The results prompted one senior NPA official to theorize that many suspects "grew up in urban areas where they had few chances to interact closely with others and probably had little sense of guilt."

For 134 suspects, the arrest was their first official brush with the law. Roughly the same number, 141, were living with parents or spouses at the time. Two Waseda University students were among those arrested on suspicion of swindling about 1.9 billion yen.

Of the suspects who had criminal records, 85 had been arrested on suspicion of theft, 53 on suspicion of committing violent crimes, 24 on suspicion of committing crimes such as fraud, and 20 for drug-related crimes. Some had committed multiple crimes.

NPA officials fear these criminals may revert to more serious crimes as police crack down on bank scams.

A majority of the offenders, 184, said they wanted the money for entertainment. While 169 were unemployed, 128 had some form of work.(IHT/Asahi: May 8,2009)