Entertainment
Bandai Namco employee stole £3,000,000 worth of mobile devices from Elden Ring publisher-Kenneth Andersen-Entertainment – Metro
An ex-employee at Bandai Namco has been arrested for stealing 4,400 mobile devices over the course of the last seven years.
An insider at Bandai Namco sold company owned devices to outside companies (Adobe/Wikipedia/Metro.co.uk)
An ex-employee at Bandai Namco has been arrested for stealing 4,400 mobile devices over the course of the last seven years.
Everyone’s stolen a few paperclips from work, maybe even the odd pen or pencil, but how about 600 million yen (£3 million) worth of mobile devices? That’s exactly what has happened at Elden Ring and Tekken publisher Bandai Namco, with a shocking revelation about an ex-employee.
The former employee, whose name has not been revealed, was arrested on suspicion of corporate embezzlement in March.
According to a statement, the suspect stole and sold 4,400 mobile devices between 2015 and 2022 to ‘outside companies’ for a huge profit.
Bandai Namco realised what was going on and fired the suspect in December 2022, before filing charges against the person the following month, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
In a statement on the Bandai Namco website, the publisher says:
‘This case is due to the fact that it was discovered that, from around April 2015 to around April 2022, the Former Employee had sold more than 4,400 mobile devices owned by the Relevant Company [Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc.] and managed by the Former Employee to outside companies without the Relevant Company’s permission, and embezzled approximately 600 million yen from the sale of these devices.’
The statement doesn’t specify what these mobile devices are, but continues to apologise to customers and shareholders and says that the company ‘reduced the remuneration of full-time directors [13 in total]’ for three months.
Bandai Namco also ‘took strict disciplinary action against former direct supervisors (11 people in total) in accordance with internal regulations, in order to clarify the managerial and supervisory responsibilities in connection with the Fraudulent Acts,’ the statement says.
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The publisher states that it will take measures to avoid something similar happening in the future, and that the impact of this will be ‘immaterial’ on its financial result for the fiscal year ending March 2025.
Either way that is a lot of mobile phones. So many that’s it hard to comprehend how they weren’t missed sooner. You can read Bandai Namco’s full statement here.
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