Tokyo man stole 200 PS5 and Nintendo Switch consoles then gambled the money

Do not pass Go, go directly to jail

A Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly selling off around 200 games consoles he was charged with delivering.

The suspect, a 50-year old unemployed man identified as Fuyuki Minemura, was arrested by Tokyo police after making off with a delivery of PS5 and Nintendo Switch hardware and games (as spotted by Kotaku), then gambling the money he made from selling the stolen merchandise on horse racing.

Japanese website Sankei says that the goods were worth ¥5.8million (approximately £38,397), and that Minemura had been entrusted to deliver the items by a shipping company. Instead, he allegedly sold units to second hand stores, chiefly around Tokyo’s Akihabara district, earning ¥3m (£19,853) from their sale.

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Nintendo Switch running Mario Odyssey
Nintendo Switch Credit: Nintendo

Both the Nintendo and Sony consoles are still in short supply even in their native Japan, so it’s perhaps easy to understand how retailers would have snapped up what would have been presumed to be trade ins for the the secondary market.

While the crimes are reported to have taken place in early October, it’s still not entirely clear how or why the suspect was given responsibility for delivering the consoles, beyond it being at the request of an acquaintence.

Minemura allegedly then laid low in internet cafes. In Tokyo, many internet cafes can be found with food and washroom facilities, and some even have private booths where users can unofficially sleep. As a result, it is not uncommon for some people to essentially live in them on a semi-permanent basis.

Kotaku quotes the suspect as saying “I made off with [the load] because I was having money problems,” and “I bet nearly all the money on horse racing.”

After his arrest, Minemura has confessed to the charges.

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Elsewhere, a Pokémon speedrunner has torn through Pokémon Shining Pearl in just 50 minutes, while a Metroid Prime developer has revealed that Nintendo is more willing to let developers experiment with game prototypes than western publishers are.

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