In the heart of Nagoya, Japan, cops have nabbed a 38-year-old guy who’s out of work, accusing him of pulling off a clever scam that scored him almost ¥3.7 million that’s roughly $24,700 in U.S. bucks in free grub over a couple of years. The dude, Takuya Higashimoto, allegedly ran this hustle from April 2023 right up to October 2025, messing with the refund setup on Demae-can, one of Japan’s big food delivery apps. They hauled him in early this month, and it’s got everyone talking about how easy it is to game these online services in our super-convenient world.
A tweet from X.
Living in Aichi Prefecture, Higashimoto supposedly set up 124 bogus accounts with throwaway phone numbers and made-up names and spots to stay under the radar. He spilled to the police, saying something like,
“I just gave it a shot at first, but once I started getting away with it, I couldn’t quit.”
What kicked off as a one-off experiment out of boredom or whatever turned into his main way to pay for stuff day-to-day.
The whole thing relied on Demae-can’s no-contact delivery, which blew up during COVID for leaving food at the door without any hassle. He’d order things like eel bentos, hamburger steaks, ice cream, or chicken steaks to places he could get to easily. After the delivery showed up, he’d hit up the app’s chat support claiming it never arrived, and boom automatic refund. Then he’d ditch the account and start fresh, racking up 1,095 fake orders that averaged about ¥3,400 a pop.
It kinda reminds you of that 2021 glitch with Demae-can’s payments where folks got free meals for up to three years before they patched it. Stuff like this shows how delivery apps are still scrambling to plug holes against sneaky users.
Demae-can covers every prefecture in Japan and has been doing mobile payments since 2018. Now they’re promising to tighten things up with better ID checks and flags for weird refund patterns to stop this from happening again. The Nagoya cops called it a “big hit financially” and are telling other companies to pay attention.
Online, people’s takes are all over the place some are impressed by how long he kept it going, while others are ripping the app for not catching on sooner, especially since shops ended up eating some of the costs. It’s sparked chats about tough times economically and where you draw the line in online deals.
Beyond that, this mess points out flaws in auto-refunds and ties into a bigger wave of fraud in deliveries worldwide. I saw a report saying fake returns dinged retailers for $103 billion just last year. From a news angle, it screams for apps to step up their game on fraud without making things a pain for regular folks maybe with smarter AI watches or required two-step logins. In this era where everything’s about ease, stories like Higashimoto’s are a wake-up call tech has to keep up with responsibility to keep everyone safe.
