A Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly selling off around 200 games consoles he was charged with delivering.
- READ MORE: The lost art of the video game manual
The suspect, a 50-year old unemployed man identified as Fuyuki Minemura, was arrested by Tokyo police after making off with a delivery of PS5 and Nintendo Switch hardware and games (as spotted by Kotaku), then gambling the money he made from selling the stolen merchandise on horse racing.
Japanese website Sankei says that the goods were worth ¥5.8million (approximately £38,397), and that Minemura had been entrusted to deliver the items by a shipping company. Instead, he allegedly sold units to second hand stores, chiefly around Tokyo’s Akihabara district, earning ¥3m (£19,853) from their sale.
Both the Nintendo and Sony consoles are still in short supply even in their native Japan, so it’s perhaps easy to understand how retailers would have snapped up what would have been presumed to be trade ins for the the secondary market.
While the crimes are reported to have taken place in early October, it’s still not entirely clear how or why the suspect was given responsibility for delivering the consoles, beyond it being at the request of an acquaintence.
