What he did not know, until an interview with this magazine last year, was the identity of the villains at the top of the chain. The real money-makers were much higher up. Shimomura deduced that he had been at the bottom of the food chain in the scam. Soon after the raids, the withdrawal limit for many A.T.M.s in the country was reduced to fifty thousand yen. The newspapers surmised that 7-Elevens had been targeted because they were the only convenience stores in Japan whose cash terminals all accepted foreign cards. As the newspapers soon reported, more than sixteen million dollars was withdrawn from roughly seventeen hundred 7-Eleven A.T.M.s across Japan that morning, using data stolen from South Africa’s Standard Bank. When Shimomura handed over his money, he sensed that the superior had enlisted many others. The superior told Shimomura that he would retain five per cent of what his volunteers brought in and send the rest of the cash to his bosses. (Later, he discovered that one of the other gangsters had absconded with the money and the card.) At 3 p.m., he met his superior to deliver the remaining money. Shimomura took his ten per cent-about thirty-five hundred dollars-and stashed it in a drawer in his apartment. Around 8 a.m., having completed a total of thirty-eight withdrawals at several A.T.M.s in the area, he headed home, waddling because of his bulging pockets: 3.8 million yen is a lot of cash. He saw a foreign name on the paper-he couldn’t tell what nationality the name was, but he knew it wasn’t Japanese-then stuffed the receipt in his pocket. There was nobody else in the store apart from the guy at the register, who didn’t seem interested in him.Īfter making the first withdrawal, Shimomura printed a receipt. When the screen asked him which language he preferred, he felt a tremor of nerves while selecting “Japanese.” He withdrew a hundred thousand yen, then another, and then another. He walked to a 7-Eleven, where he bought a rice ball and a Coke, to settle himself. On Sunday morning, Shimomura rose early, and dressed in jeans, sunglasses, a baseball cap, and an old T-shirt. Finally, each volunteer was told to memorize a PIN. They could keep ten per cent of the cash. After making nineteen withdrawals, they should wait an hour before visiting another 7-Eleven. The volunteers were told to choose the Japanese language when prompted-an indication, Shimomura realized, that the cards were foreign. If anybody made twenty withdrawals from a single A.T.M., his card would be blocked. The gangsters should each withdraw a hundred thousand yen at a time (about nine hundred dollars) but make no more than nineteen transactions per machine.
They could not use a regular bank A.T.M., or one in another convenience store. The superior read instructions from a thin manual: early the next morning, a Sunday, they should go to any 7-Eleven and use their white card at the store’s A.T.M. There was no chip on the card, no numbers, no name-just a magnetic strip. Each volunteer was given a plain white credit card.
The superior finally arrived, and the five men moved into a private room. Like many yakuza, he is of Korean descent, and two of the others were also Korean-Japanese for a while, they spoke in Korean. (Shimomura, who has since left the Yamaguchi-gumi, asked to be referred to only by his surname.) When Shimomura showed up, he found three other gangsters, none of whom he knew. The superior assured him that the scheme was low risk, and instructed him to attend a meeting that evening at a bar in Nagoya. But he was a minor figure in the organization: a collector of debts, a performer of odd jobs. Thirty-two years old and skinny, with expressive eyes, he took pride in his appearance, often wearing a suit and mirror-shined loafers. It was May 14, 2016, and Shimomura was living in the city of Nagoya. When one of his superiors asked him if he wanted to make a pile of fast money, he naturally said yes. Shimomura was a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza crime family in Japan.
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