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back to article Embezzler stings IBM, Microsoft in Japan

A former IBM Japan employee who stole nearly £1 million from Big Blue has been arrested in Tokyo on suspicion of embezzling £100,000 from his new employer, Microsoft Japan. Yoshiyuki Ikutani, 48, who hails from the capital, worked for a year at IBM Business Consulting Services, but pocketed most of the fee he charged clients …

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  1. Tom 35

    He apparently invested the embezzled funds in various private ventures including foreign exchange trading.

    So he gambled it all away.

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    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
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      More or less. The first thing that comes to mind is that the fellow saw this not as an opportunity to outright steal the money but rather as a means of gaining a temporary influx of large amounts of capital he wouldn't otherwise have access to. He probably figured he would then invest it in something with a high short term return and pay back the original monies owed; he would pocket the difference and essentially get a "free" loan from IBM/Microsoft/etc.

      I'd have to think that outright theft (in which the "clients" simply never paid their bills) would get noticed and banged up immediately. The scheme I propose, however, is just as illegal but could conceivably go undetected for long enough for the guy to get away with oodles of cash. (The cash being either the interest he pocketed from the investments or the final amount he simply couldn't pay back because he sucks at investing.)

      I'd be very interested in finding out the details. Sounds like a fun mystery. "How gaming the system doesn't work if you are an idiot and suck at gambling."

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  2. Alex in Tokyo

    So according to this (http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20130617-00000049-jij-soci) article by Jiji Tsushin, the guy had made a loss of "some hundreds of millions of yen" (it reads like this was the loss from investing the money he embezzled from IBM), and joined MS in order to steal money for living expenses and to pay off his loans.

    So he was originally arrested for, and has been charged with, the embezzlement (JPY 130,000,000) while at IBM, and has just been re-arrested for the fraud at MS.

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  3. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    "it reads like this was the loss from investing the money he embezzled from IBM"

    If he was investing on margin, he could even have lost over 100% of his original money.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    say what?

    At Redmond's Japanese outpost he managed to pocket ¥15 million (£100,000) illegally, apparently by setting up a fictitious consulting company and forging the signature of the imaginary president on bank transfers.

    Hunh? How can you forge the signature of a fake someone who you created in the first place??

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