A 38-year-old man from Nagoya, Japan, named Takuya Higashimoto was recently arrested for scamming a food delivery service out of 1,000 free meals.
Food delivery apps such as DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats have become incredibly popular, and for good reason. Even though they can be expensive with delivery fees and extra charges, they make it easy to get meals from your favorite restaurants delivered right to your door.
It’s not unusual for customers to falsely claim their food order never arrived, often hoping to get a refund or a free meal. While repeat offenders are usually penalized or denied refunds, one man in Japan discovered a clever way to bypass these rules.
Japanese man finesses delivery app for $25K in free food
Takuya Higashimoto is facing accusations of making over 1,000 fake orders with the Japanese food delivery service, Demae-can, starting in April 2023. He allegedly claimed the orders were never delivered to avoid paying, resulting in a loss of around $24,370 for the company.
According to The Japan Times, he received a refund of about $105 (16,000 yen) on July 30th after falsely reporting to Demae-can—through their chat feature—that his food delivery hadn’t arrived, despite having already received it.
Higashimoto managed to get this refund by creating around 124 fake accounts on the service, using false names and addresses, and then canceling his membership over two and a half years. To avoid being caught, he also bought new SIM cards and changed his phone number, and claims he successfully used this method with other apps as well.
“It started with a single attempt, but once I saw how much I could gain by deceiving people, I couldn’t stop,” he told the police.
According to local reports, the man ordered a lot of expensive food, including ice cream, eel dishes, and hamburger steaks. The food delivery service estimates he was able to get around eight free meals from each account before creating a new one.
Following Higashimoto’s arrest, Demae-can announced plans to improve its fraud detection systems to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
The company announced it will aggressively fight fraud going forward, and is building a system to identify and stop it quickly.
A recent food delivery went above and beyond when an Uber Eats driver helped save a customer who was stranded on a New York City rooftop. The story has quickly spread online.
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2025-10-14 21:19