BBC Trending: Yami Baito - Inside Japan’s dark part-time jobs

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A wave of criminal activity in Japan has been blamed on social media. Yami Baito – meaning “dark part-time jobs” in Japanese – refers to job ads posted by criminal gangs on social media and encrypted messaging platforms including Telegram. Jobseekers are blackmailed or enticed with the promise of getting rich quick to commit a range of crimes from scamming elderly people to, at its most extreme, armed robbery. Japanese police have attempted to crack down on Yami Baito by taking down these ads and launching public awareness campaigns. But BBC Trending explores evidence that these recruiters are still operating online. We hear from someone who got sucked into Yami Baito, and a criminal mastermind in charge of recruitment.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's 6 p.m. a bright evening in the heart of Tokyo's swanky Ginza district.
0:08.2	The streets are lined with high-end boutiques and shoppers are enjoying the relaxed atmosphere.
0:15.0	Suddenly the calm is shattered.
0:18.0	Inside a luxury watch shop,
0:20.0	three men in masks start smashing through the display cases with crow bars.
0:25.0	Bystanders watch in disbelief, some filming the incident on their phones,
0:30.0	as the criminals stuff Rolex's worth more than a million dollars into their rucksacks
0:34.8	and steal away in a getaway car.
0:37.2	Just a few hours later, police catch up with the perpetrators,
0:41.7	mostly teenagers.
0:44.3	It emerges that at least one of those involved was apparently recruited via a social media post.
0:51.8	The robbery, which happened in May 2023, shocked Japan, not just because of the country's famously low crime rate,
1:00.0	but because it exposed a growing online phenomenon known as Yami Bayhto.
1:05.0	These are dark part-time jobs,
1:08.0	where ordinary people are recruited for criminal activities using social media.
1:14.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:18.0	I'm Dan Hardoon, and with BBC Trending, I'm investigating the hidden world of dark part-time jobs in Japan, known as Yami Baito.
1:28.0	I've been speaking to someone who was lured into a life of crime by a job posting he saw online.
1:36.0	They started threatening me, saying they know where I live.
1:39.5	They said, we are going to set fire to your house or throw you in the ocean.
1:45.0	And to a former criminal mastermind in charge of recruitment.
1:49.0	These Yami Baito were targeting people who were desperate enough to respond to these ads,
	...

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