Elderly Tokyo woman swindled out of over 700,000 dollars in cryptocurrency

An elderly woman in Tokyo has been swindled out of 97 million yen, or about 744,000 dollars, in cryptocurrency after receiving a fraudulent phone call warning her that her bank account was being used for a crime.

Tokyo police say a woman in her 80s living in Setagaya Ward received phone calls from someone posing as a Ward Office official and another as a police officer in November.

The callers reportedly told her that her account was being used for a crime and that she would also be implicated.

Police say she also received phone calls from someone pretending to be a Finance Services Agency official and another claiming to be a lawyer. They urged her to transfer her money to another account as it would be frozen.

Following their instructions, the woman opened an account for cryptocurrency transactions and bought digital currency worth about 744,000 dollars. She registered a password that her callers had specified.

She later received a phone call from a cryptocurrency exchange about her huge transaction and realized soon after that almost all of the money in her account had been withdrawn.

Tokyo police have been investigating the case as fraud.