Nine members of a self-styled psychic medium group were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of defrauding passers-by out of millions of yen by offering to drive evil spirits from their bodies, prefectural police said.
Shunichi Miyazaki, 55, a resident of Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, and eight others are accused of defrauding eight people out of a combined 5.12 million yen. However, this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. Police suspect that they used the same trick to swindle some 1,700 people out of approximately 150 million yen.
The nine, who called their group, "Ijuin," spoke to eight women in their 20s to 50s at railway stations and department stores in Kanagawa Prefecture and Tokyo between December 2000 and last March, police said.
The Ijuin members falsely told their victims that they were possessed by an evil spirit, and that they would die unless they were exorcised, according to investigators.
They then took the victims to a Tokyo hotel, or what they called a "chapel" in Kamakura, and received a combined 5.12 million yen to expel the evil spirits that had invaded the women's bodies.
They wore tennis outfits and carried either a tennis racket or a violin to make them look like ordinary passers-by, prefectural police said.