This story grows weirder by the day.

1. What happened

Due to corona, families with income under certain levels were able to get a one time JPY100,000 payment from their local governments.

The town in question is a small town with a high proportion of elderly. The town was actually going to be merged with a neighboring town because the population has been decreasing. However, the town decided to cut its costs and stay independent. This required getting rid of some government staff that had years of experience.

To process the payments to roughly 430 families , the town loaded the data on a floppy desk (yes floppy disk) and delivered it to the bank. Unfortunately a new and inexperienced town staffer also filled out a paper transfer slip with a list of the 430 recipients

Based on the floppy desk data all 430 families got their JPY100k. Then the bank system processed the paper transfer but sent all the funds to the first name on the list. This happened to be a 24 year old kid with gambling issues.

2. Kid allegedly shoots it off

For whatever reason the town never froze the kid’s bank account. Over the next week he transferred all but about 500 dollars to two different banks who the moved the funds to three payment processors to be transferred to the offshore casinos.

3. Lucky break for the town

The town got its lawyers to visit the three payment processors’ head offices in Tokyo. They hadn’t shipped the money offshore yet (but see below) and the town will get over 90 percent of their money back.

4. Still unclear

The names of the offshore casinos is not yet known to the public. It is also not known if the kid really shot it off that quick or if he just loaded the money onto his account. It is also possible that the payment processors shipped the money offshore and are just covering the loss out off their own pockets. Also unknown why the kids bank would allow this since it smells like money laundering. He had about six dollars in his bank account prior to all this. He is now in custody.