We often hear about people who dupe institutions like banks for foreign money, but have you heard of a ‘hungry crook’ who scams a food delivery app for free food? Not in India, but from overseas, it has been reported that a Japanese youth has been cheating food delivery apps for free food for two years continuously, and it is not a fraud that can be repeated. The youth has snatched free food worth around Rs 21 lakh in the last two years. Let’s delve deeper into the details of this crime that will make you laugh after reading it and find out what tricks he used to commit this hoax.
The 38-year-old accused, ‘Takuya Higashimoto’, has been accused of abusing the popular food delivery service ‘Demae-kan’ from April 2023 to July 2025. During this period, he made more than 1,095 food orders, worth lakhs of rupees, without paying a single rupee!
Takuya used the ‘contactless delivery’ facility offered by the food delivery app as a weapon. In contactless delivery, the customer orders food through the app and pays online. The delivery employee leaves a food packet outside the door at the customer’s address and notifies the customer through the app that the food has been delivered. The customer then opens the door and takes the packet. Thus, due to this facility, the customer does not have to directly contact the food delivery person.
What did Takuya do? He would take the food packet and then immediately file a complaint on the app that his order had not been received. For this, he never spoke to customer care on a phone call, he always filed a complaint by messaging through the chat facility, so that there was no possibility of his call being recorded. Assuming that the delivery person had mistakenly delivered the food to someone else, the delivery app would return the money to Takuya’s account. Since no customer played such a game of fraud, Takuya was not suspected.
Takuya also cleverly used technology to hide his identity and so that no one would suspect him. He created more than 124 fake accounts on the delivery app and he would order from a different account each time, so that no one would suspect that the same person was doing such a scam. To create so many accounts, he bought numerous prepaid mobile SIM cards. He also used fake names and different addresses for new orders. Sometimes someone would order outside a shopping mall, sometimes outside a government office! Once the order was completed, the money paid was credited to his account, he would delete the account and then try ‘new girl, new bet’ while ordering again.
On July 30, 2025, Takuya ordered food from a new account and after receiving the food, he complained through the chat facility to get the money paid back. This time, the food delivery company got suspicious, as this was happening repeatedly. They took out the history of all such orders in the past and gave a long list of them to the police. The police investigated. It took two and a half months, but finally in October, the police reached Takuya and arrested him.
Due to Takuya’s fraud, the food delivery company has suffered a loss of 3.7 million yen (about 2.1 million in Indian rupees). In his confession to the police, Takuya Higashimoto said that he was encouraged by the success of his plan on the first attempt, which led him to commit such fraud for two years in a row. Since the Japanese people are considered to be very hardworking and honest, this case is being discussed all over the country. The Japanese cannot believe that someone would go to such a low level for something like food. The whole country is now waiting to see how the court will punish the culprit for such a crime.
