Mainichi Shimbun,Japan -- Two foreigners who conned an executive into paying for a "special liquid" designed to clean what they called black-coated U.S. bank notes worth millions of dollars were arrested Friday, police said.
The bills the accused, Jonathan Edwin Thorpe from Liberia and Michael Okudzeto from Ghana, described as U.S. currency were just black-coated paper, said Shibuya Police Station officers.
Thorpe and Okudzeto told a company executive from Tokyo's Setagaya-ku in February that they were in possession of "black bills" worth some 5 million dollars or 590 million yen when they first met the victim at a coffee shop in Tokyo's Roppongi district.
They then invited the 50-year-old businessman to a hotel in Tokyo's Shibuya area and tried to entice him into a joint business plan involving huge money.
After meeting at the hotel on Feb. 20, Thorpe, 33, who claimed to be an interior designer, and Okudzeto, a 32-year-old trader, cleaned a note with what they called special liquid, and then asked the victim to pay for the liquid to clean the rest of the notes.
Then they swindled the man out of some 1.5 million yen, the officers said. During their meeting, two other people accompanied the conmen in an apparent attempt to convince the victim that the black bills were genuine.
A man who claimed to be a son of a former Liberian president and a woman who said she was the son's wife, told the executive that the notes were part of a financial aid package the U.S. extended to Liberia.
The man added that he had taken possession of the money from his father. The officers are on the hunt for the man and the woman.
