Japan’s Bigmotor Collapses Because It Was Fraud All The Way Down
The largest used car/car repair chain in Japan collapsed last month over fraud. And not just fraud, but an amazing panoply of varigated fraud.
After the founder hired his son to run things (big red flag), Bigmotor started earning record profits and rapidly expanded across Japan. Turns out the growth came not only through fraud, but particularly naked and egregious fraud.
They would damage customers tires, and then tell them they needed four new ones. And a trainee captured fraud instructions on video. They even had quotas for how much they had to git out of everyone who came in for a repair.
But why just rip off customers when you can also ripoff the insurance company? “When the customer had insurance, Big Motor always milked the job for as much as they could. They knew the most expensive things to damage to jack up the bill.” They made damage worse, used tricks to make claim photos look worse, and even bashed car panels with socks full of golf balls.
Alerted to the fraud, they let Bigmotor investigate themselves.
Another reason insurance companies didn’t rock the boat: Bigmotor was once of the biggest sellers of car insurance in Japan. And Sompo Japan, one of the big three, was one of the biggest stockholders in Bigmotor.
Everywhere a tree along a public road blocked a Bigmotor sign, they poisoned the tree.
They also treated their employees like shit, setting impossible quotas and threatening to fire employees who didn’t buy a used car.
All of it finally caught up with them. “61 workers, or nearly 60% of 104 surveyed employees, said they had been ordered by their supervisors to pad car repair charges to receive bigger insurance payouts…Bigmotor has so far found 1,275 cases of such fraudulent practices and that ¥6.62 million in insurance benefits for 177 of the cases have been repaid, the company said.” The heads at Bigmotor (and his crooked son) resigned, and the head of Sompo Japan stepped down as well.
It used to be that this sort of institutional corporate fraud was all but unthinkable in Japan. But recently several high profile fraud cases have hit companies like Olympus, Nissan and Kobe Steel.
Still, those involved various accounting shenanigans rather gross fraud against customers. I would expect some prison sentences at Bigmotor are in order…
This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2023 at 8:42 PM and is filed under unions, video, Waste and Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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5 Responses to “Japan’s Bigmotor Collapses Because It Was Fraud All The Way Down”
Anyone expecting automatic “law abiding” out of the Japanese really underestimates human nature.
Yeah, you visit Japan? It looks all neat and clean, with everyone smiling and being helpful. This is a facade, plastered over a severely controlling and conformist society. The average Japanese person just goes along with it all, but… Man, when they lose their sh*t? They lose it. Aum Shinriko, for example?
There’s also the way all that pressure leaks out. It used to be vented with physical abuse, which was why the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were such a hell on earth, and why they tended to take things out on POWs. You have a situation where Private Ogata is getting the snot knocked out of him on the daily, and he’s suddenly got POWs to look after? LOL… Whaddya expect, round-eyes?
Today, they let their freak flag fly with things like anime, and bizarre criminality. Friend of mine was an English teacher over there, and the crap she described as routine in the schools and the town where she taught were something else.
Japanese feudalism, as typified by Samurais culture, would prefer death to dishonor. Seppuku provided the means of expunging shame.
Religiously, the Japanese embraced ancestor worship. Dishonoring your family name was anathema.
To accommodate the foreign system of religious obligation forced on them after losing WWII, guilt began to replace shame as the ruling operative. For long years the Japanese have resisted this trend, going so far as to censor the historical record of their war atrocities.
So while defeat upended their system of loyalty and honor (misplaced as it was) they successfully resisted efforts to bring them into the guilt culture practiced in the West.
Thus, they have fallen between two stools, constrained neither by guilt nor shame. Expect to see more scandals as the national identity flails about in attempting to redefine ethical conduct.
Japanese feudalism, as typified by Samurais culture, would prefer death to dishonor. Seppuku provided the means of expunging shame.
It’s worth pointing out that this was a development of the Tokugawa Shogunate, after the samurai were no longer a warrior class (because unified, isolationist Japan had no one to fight) and the samurai depended on the largesse of their liege for any income at all, since they were forbidden to commit commerce and no longer had any lands of their own from which to derive an income.
Before then, samurai were a more typical warrior class. While they held ‘honor’ as a nice ideal, victory was sufficient to wash away damn near any other short comings a samurai might have.
Not that it matters, because Tokugawa-era _bushido_ was what the Meiji government twisted into the ideology they filled their schools with.
Anyone expecting automatic “law abiding” out of the Japanese really underestimates human nature.
Yeah, you visit Japan? It looks all neat and clean, with everyone smiling and being helpful. This is a facade, plastered over a severely controlling and conformist society. The average Japanese person just goes along with it all, but… Man, when they lose their sh*t? They lose it. Aum Shinriko, for example?
There’s also the way all that pressure leaks out. It used to be vented with physical abuse, which was why the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were such a hell on earth, and why they tended to take things out on POWs. You have a situation where Private Ogata is getting the snot knocked out of him on the daily, and he’s suddenly got POWs to look after? LOL… Whaddya expect, round-eyes?
Today, they let their freak flag fly with things like anime, and bizarre criminality. Friend of mine was an English teacher over there, and the crap she described as routine in the schools and the town where she taught were something else.
Weird culture, Japan. And, Korea.
Japanese feudalism, as typified by Samurais culture, would prefer death to dishonor. Seppuku provided the means of expunging shame.
Religiously, the Japanese embraced ancestor worship. Dishonoring your family name was anathema.
To accommodate the foreign system of religious obligation forced on them after losing WWII, guilt began to replace shame as the ruling operative. For long years the Japanese have resisted this trend, going so far as to censor the historical record of their war atrocities.
So while defeat upended their system of loyalty and honor (misplaced as it was) they successfully resisted efforts to bring them into the guilt culture practiced in the West.
Thus, they have fallen between two stools, constrained neither by guilt nor shame. Expect to see more scandals as the national identity flails about in attempting to redefine ethical conduct.
Onliest problem is, in Japan, when a company gets caught, there is frequently a “heartfelt apology, with promises to improve”. And that’s it.
It’s worth pointing out that this was a development of the Tokugawa Shogunate, after the samurai were no longer a warrior class (because unified, isolationist Japan had no one to fight) and the samurai depended on the largesse of their liege for any income at all, since they were forbidden to commit commerce and no longer had any lands of their own from which to derive an income.
Before then, samurai were a more typical warrior class. While they held ‘honor’ as a nice ideal, victory was sufficient to wash away damn near any other short comings a samurai might have.
Not that it matters, because Tokugawa-era _bushido_ was what the Meiji government twisted into the ideology they filled their schools with.
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