Japan's tennis legend turned romance scammer: 'I was a doctor in Paris'

Rika Hiraki, the tennis star who won the mixed doubles title at the 1997 French Open alongside India's Mahesh Bhupathi — becoming the first Japanese player to win a Grand Slam title in mixed doubles — was arrested Tuesday on romance scam charges. [Getty Images]

"Hello. I am a doctor working at a hospital in Paris. I have an important package held up at customs. I need a certificate to retrieve it, but I'm having trouble getting cash right now and need 300,000 yen ($1,830) to cover the certificate fee. Please help me."

It was 2022, a time when connecting with strangers through SNS had become a popular pastime. A woman in her 50s from Kagoshima, Japan — identified only as Ms. A — received a message like this on SNS in the spring of that year. The sender presented himself as a friendly, soft-spoken doctor. After exchanging pleasantries, he asked her for 300,000 yen to retrieve an important package. Ms. A did not suspect a thing and willingly transferred the money to the account he provided.

But the 300,000 yen Ms. A sent did not go to any doctor tending patients in a hospital — it went to a former sports star. The scheme that exploited her goodwill to steal her money already had a name: romance scam. What shocked Ms. A was the identity of the perpetrator. A sports star who had been the darling of Japanese fans in the 1990s had taken part in the scam, even posing as a different gender.

According to local media including the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Sukumo Police Station of the Kochi Prefectural Police arrested Rika Hiraki, 54, a former professional tennis player now working as an office worker in Shiroi, Chiba Prefecture, on fraud charges on Tuesday.

Police said Hiraki is suspected of defrauding Ms. A of 300,000 yen together with an accomplice between February and May 2022. The account Ms. A transferred the money to belonged to Hiraki, and 270,000 yen of the total was moved to Hiraki's cryptocurrency account. Security camera footage captured Hiraki withdrawing 20,000 yen in cash from an ATM in Chiba Prefecture.

Police said they became aware of Ms. A's case while investigating a separate fraud case and continued their investigation from there. Authorities believe Hiraki and her accomplice may have defrauded other victims beyond Ms. A. Hiraki has denied the allegations, saying she has no memory of the fraudulent conduct police are investigating.

The case has sent shockwaves through Japanese society, in part because it involves one of the country's most celebrated tennis stars. Hiraki was a professional tennis player at the height of her career in the 1990s, winning the mixed doubles title at the 1997 French Open alongside India's Mahesh Bhupathi. She is credited as the first Japanese player to win a Grand Slam title in mixed doubles, a feat that earned her the designation of Japan's first mixed doubles Grand Slam champion. In tennis, a Grand Slam traditionally refers to winning all four major tournaments — the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open — in a single year, though in modern usage the term is also applied to any player who wins even one of the four majors.

Rika Hiraki competes in the mixed doubles event at Wimbledon in London in July 1997, partnered with Mahesh Bhupathi. [Getty Images]

The involvement of a sports star in a romance scam reflects a broader surge in sophisticated fraud in Japan, including voice phishing schemes. According to the Nikkei, fraudsters have recently been demanding gold bars instead of cash transfers to evade police account tracing.

Japan's National Police Agency said fraud losses tied to gold bar schemes totaled about 5.8 billion yen last year and 4.5 billion yen from January through May this year. Combined losses over the 17-month period from last year through May this year exceeded 10 billion yen.

According to police, fraud rings impersonate police officers or National Tax Service officials, telling victims that criminal proceeds have been deposited into their accounts and that the funds must be laundered. The victims are then instructed to convert their cash into gold bars, which are later collected by couriers — often foreign nationals, to make it harder for police to trace the operation back to the ringleaders.

In a recent case in Tokyo, a woman in her 80s was tricked by a gang impersonating police into handing over a 1-kilogram gold bar — worth about 200 million won ($136,000) — to a Taiwanese courier in his 20s. The Taiwanese courier who was arrested told investigators he "received instructions through a mobile app from someone he had never met in person," making it difficult for police to expand the investigation to identify the ringleader.

kate01@heraldcorp.com