The Chiba dentist is among five defendants accused of fraudulently using foreigners' health cards to claim fees

TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested a dentist and four others for allegedly misusing the health insurance cards of 64 international students to defraud the government of Nagoya City and other municipalities out of medical fees when they actually had no dental care offered treatment.

In early June last year, dentist Akira Oishi, 61, Akihiro Mizutani, the 35-year-old director of an association that sends foreigners, and three others allegedly defrauded Nagoya city and other areas of about 1.65 million yen.

According to NHK (October 2), police said the suspects used the health insurance cards of 64 international students, including a Nepalese citizen, and falsely claimed medical expenses under the pretext of “getting dental treatment” at a dental clinic in Edogawa district. to have carried out.

Police did not announce whether the suspects admitted to the fraud allegations.

Mizutani ran a Japanese language school in Aichi Prefecture with which he has a business partnership to “attract students by offering free dental exams.” Later, when Oishi and his associates offered free health screenings to international students and technical interns, they fraudulently obtained personal information from the health insurance cards.

Oishi, who lives in Narita City, Chiba, and his accomplices misused this information to collect medical fees for services they did not actually provide.

The police believe that the crime is more extensive than the results of the initial investigation. It is likely that the suspects have used the cards of at least 200 foreigners to collect at least 20 million yen since October last year.

For the second time

The arrest is not the first for Oishi. In 2017, police accused him and an accomplice, dentist Ryota Sekiguchi, of defrauding the Shinjuku District government of 120,000 yen

They allegedly misused the health insurance card numbers of women who visited the dental clinic run by Sekiguchi to file fraudulent claims.

According to police, the two admitted the allegations. Oishi said: “I started making fraudulent claims about nine years ago. I used the money I cheated to pay off my debts.”

Based on bank account records, Kanagawa Prefectural Police estimated that at least 600 million yen in medical fees were defrauded over the past seven years.