One complaint just wasn’t enough.
A Japanese man, 71, has reportedly been arrested after making a whopping 24,000 complaint calls to major telephone operator KDDI Corporation.
Akitoshi Okamoto has been accused of making hundreds of toll-free calls to complain that the company had violated his contract, followed by thousands more from public payphones.
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Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police said he would call to voice his concerns, as well as insult customer service staff at the phone company.
Sometimes, he’d call the customer service line and immediately hang up.
“He demanded that KDDI staff come to him to apologize for violating his contract. He also repeatedly hung up his calls immediately after placing them,” a police representative told Agence France-Presse.
The spokesperson added that Okamoto was arrested on suspicion of fraudulent obstruction of business (when an individual makes it impossible for a business to run normally).
KDDI said it didn’t want to press charges at first, but the calls became so frequent that they impacted its ability to deal with other clients.
Japanese people are in the midst of what some have dubbed a “loneliness” epidemic.
A range of technologies have recently emerged in the country to combat rising loneliness, HuffPost reported. They’re designed to provide companionship.
Japan has the oldest population in the world, and statistics show that an estimated 6.24 million people over the age of 65, and a total of 18.4 million adults, live alone.
It’s believed that by 2040, 40 per cent of the country will live by themselves.
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