Photo/Illutration Tokyo police arrested three people in connection with alleged fraud involving converting points of electronic payment service PayPay into cash. (The Asahi Shimbun)

Three members of a family were arrested on suspicion of illicitly obtaining points of electronic payment service PayPay and converting them into cash, police announced on Oct. 8.

Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department suspects that the trio earned points worth about 20 million yen ($188,730) and bought a number of items, including a Toyota Motor Corp. Lexus luxury sedan.

The suspects are a male company executive, 49, an unemployed woman, 53, and another unemployed man, 26. They are residents of Soka, Saitama Prefecture, and run a business that assists customers with user identification procedures for apps and other online services.

Its operators provide mobile phone numbers they prepared for that purpose and other necessary information to customers to enable them to create new accounts or log in to the services without using or obtaining their own phone numbers.

Police suspect that the three set up new PayPay accounts using some 40,000 mobile phone numbers contained in subscriber identity module (SIM) cards they obtained for their business and earned the roughly 20-million-yen worth of points through the accounts, the sources said.

At the time, points worth 500 yen were provided to each user who had created a new account under a PayPay campaign to attract new users.

The three were arrested on suspicion of offering fictitious trading cards on the online auction site Yafuoku (Yahoo! auction) 800 times or so between June and July 2019 and buying the items themselves using the points they earned when they set up the PayPay accounts.

They allegedly converted roughly 400,000-yen worth of the points into cash.

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